My Food Log
When I enrolled in my PhD program in Tasmania, in 2005, i started keeping detauled logs of how I spent my time, so I would later be able to look it up if I ever wondered “why isn’t my thesis done yet?”
Since I was tracking everything else, I decided to also track my eating. But not the way people who are trying to lose weight do, by counting calories. I was more interested in seeing how my diet is balanced in terms of types of food I am eating.
Therefore I defined six catagories, and assigned everything I ate to one or more of these catagories, so I could watch if/how the percentages changed over time.
Since I don’t eat factory food if I can avoid it, and strongly prefer my own cooking over restaurant food (being a fussy eater), it is pretty easy to keep track of what is in my food. On those occasions I eat something that someone else cooks I either ask or guess the relative proportions of ingredients.
Here are the definitions I use for my catagories. Note that a food scientist or nutritionist would likely have done it very differently.
Protein
Around the same time I started my food log I also transitioned to a mostly plant-based diet, having figured out that the unpleasant after effects in my digestive tract didn’t happen if I avoided eating store-bought meat. Therefore, this category mostly tracks the percentage of my food intake that is nuts and beans, but on those occasionsI eat something containing meat, it goes here, too. I also noticed early on on my food log journey that the cheese I normally bought had on its ingredients list that it was 7% protein. Therefore, if I eat a solid cheese like cheddar or the Swedish hushållsost, I record it as 93% dairy and 7% protein. But if I eat a softer cheese like ricotta or the Swedish färskost, I call it 100% dairy.
Dairy
Any real dairy product goes in here. I love cream, cheese, and butter, so I eat a fair bit of it. Note thst as explained above, I track solid cheeses as 93% dairy and 7% protein
Starch
I love fresh baked bread, with plenty of butter. This catagory is for the bread part, or other grain based baked goods, and any other starchy things I eat, like rice, oatmeal, potatoes, etc.
Vegetable
In this catagory I record things that are commonly considered to be vegetables, so in addition to things like broccli and spinach, it also includes tomatos and avacodo.
Fruit
All of the fruits and berries I eat.
”Junk”
This is where I record any processed sugar, honey, non-dairy fat or oil used. (I normally only use oil if I am cooking for someone with a dairy allergy—I am one who loves butter, but dislikes the taste of vegetable oils. I don’t even like the popular Swedish blend of butter and oil that is soft enough to spread straight from the fridge. I would rather eat my bread dry than use that). The catagory “junk” also gets used on the rare occasion I eat factory food, especially “junk food”, when I assign a percentage of that item to the catagory junk. Sometimes that percentage is based on a guess, sometimes I read the ingredients and adjust the junk % up or down based on what I see there.
My Food Log Data
The data is all in spreadsheet form, but I have ideas of how it can be migrated here, so this folder is poised and ready, in case I ever get motivated to do so.