Welcome to Day 13 of Sleekgeek’s free 30-Day You Healthy Habits Challenge!
Each day for the next 30 days you will receive 1 task to complete in order to help you eat, move, think, or sleep better.
Today’s task is to journal everything you eat:
Writing down every single piece of food that you put into your mouth can be a real eye-opener – even if it’s only done for one day.
Studies have shown that we tend to be extremely biased when trying to recall what we have recently eaten. We almost always eat more carbohydrate-dense and high-calorie foods, and less nutrient-dense, low-calorie, fibrous veggie kind of foods than we think we do.
If you are someone who feels like you are constantly dieting and hardly eating anything at all but still not losing weight then this is such an important task for you to do.
Journaling your food intake can teach you some fascinating things about your eating habits such as:
- Why you’re eating when you’re not hungry (emotions, boredom, habit, etc).
- What eating patterns emerge (out of stress, lack of sleep, skipped meals, etc).
- How your dining companions affect your food intake (eating alone versus with company).
- How fast you eat your food.
- How often you snack.
- How you feel after eating certain foods (full and satisfied, stuffed but unsatisfied, etc).
- If you eat as much or as little as you think you do (reality versus perception).
How to complete today’s task:
Thankfully you don’t need to start looking up every nutrition label, calculating the exact calories of each bite you take, and then logging it in some complicated Excel spreadsheet.
Instead, all you are going to do is take a photo of everything you eat.
Yep, it’s THAT simple!
Every time you are about to eat a meal, eat a snack, or drink anything except plain water you are going to snap a quick photo of it using your camera phone (or if need be, an actual camera).
This takes only seconds and is a great way to boost your Instagram feed (haha – but hey seriously take us with #Sleekgeek #Health24 #UltimateYou).
At the end of the day you can review everything you have eaten and drunk – you may just surprise yourself. This is a perfect time to spot mistakes in your diet or remind yourself about great meal ideas that you enjoyed and want to make again sometime.
Building on both the writing it down and the taking a photo techniques, a killer accountability tool is to send everything you eat either as a photo or a text via WhatsApp, email, or similar to someone else.
Both of you agree to send each other the details of anything you are about to put in your mouth, and if you want you can offer some feedback or encouragement too.
DONE!
See you tomorrow for your Day 14’s task.
If you have just stumbled on this page sign up for Sleekgeek’s full 30-Day Healthy Habits Challenge right here. It is 100% free.
Want more of this kind of thing?
- Read our blog post on How Eating Slowly Can Help You Lose Weight.
- Read our blog post on Only One Bad Meal.
- Read our blog post on 4 Causes of Weekend Overeating (and how to fix them).
- Read our blog post on A Killer Accountability Tool.
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