Food Journal, revisited

I confess I've never understood the concept, or perhaps the terminology, of "cheating" on a diet. Cheating, to me, means taking a short-cut to win. I'm not sure how you'd even do that on a diet, since, if you don't follow it, you don't lose weight. So you haven't won. I'd say that maybe I think dehydrating oneself with laxatives or diuretics was cheating since it involves weight loss but not fat loss, but to call it simply "cheating" seems to understate horrendously the potential harm it can do.

Just sayin'.

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I meant to post this earlier but kept forgetting to take new pictures.

I re-did my food journal, in a different format. I got another small notebook (well, small-ish, maybe 5 x 8?) that had a plastic pocket bound into it. I've picked up a couple of nutritional-information fliers from chain restaurants and wanted a place to keep them, and a pocket in a notebook seemed the most convenient.

The listing looks the same (this day wasn't complete):

. . . with my glasses of water checked off. I also write if I take a vitamin, and occasionally I write my weight, just to keep track. Not very often, though; I don't really want that to be the focus, I just want to make sure I don't creep back up when I'm not looking.

I had to move the pocket from the front to the back. Well, I didn't have to, but I wanted to, so I un-bent the end of the spiral, wound it out of the notebook, moved the pocket, wound the spiral back in, and pinched the end back together. Lots of work for something trivial, right?

Anyway, there's the pocket with my McDonald's flier.

I also made a Word document with a listing of common foods and calories per measure. It's not very precise (things are sort of rounded up to the nearest 5 or 10 to make it easier to add them up) but it's good for estimates. Since I've got it on the computer, I can update it as I need to. I keep a copy of that in the pocket, too.