Food Aware

Posted on 15 February, 2012 by Sam | Be the First to Comment

How food aware are you?

I’ve always been quite conscious of the ingredients in foods I eat, because I’ve suffered from a range of allergies since a very young age. However the phrase “You are what you eat” still puts a bit of the fear into me – because it is really easy to deceive ourselves about the things we put in our stomachs.

After the first mistake in seven years that led to me eating a tiny amount of wheat (and being quite ill) recently, I decided to target my broader dietary complacency with a dose of daily reality.

Challenge: Keep a food diary for 3-4 weeks!

This was something I’d been thinking about for a while, but it seemed like a pretty big commitment to record everything I ate/drank for a month. Plus I wanted to capture how I felt after consuming different things, because I also suspected I had been ignoring a number of signals my body had been giving me… being a wheat-intolerant vegetarian means I’d eat loads of fresh fruit & veg right? Ah, denial!

So after only a week of keeping a food diary, I’ve been amazed at some of the insights it has given me, including:

If I have to record every time I eat chocolate, it certainly makes me think twice about how much of it I eat!
I discovered my wheat mistake on the first morning, and was shocked to realise that it had affected not just my digestive system but also how well I’d been sleeping (rubbish) and my levels of concentration (poor) too.
Sweet things in the morning really don’t get me off to a great start (in fact, they make me feel a bit ill & distracted).
During the first few days I was sorely tempted to use the excuse that I hadn’t noted the time I’d eaten as a reason for not completing my food diary that day (and as soon as I allowed myself to use approximate times, I’ve found it easy to complete).
I tend to rely on quick convenience foods if I don’t pre-plan an alternative; especially at lunch.
There’s a lot less variety in my diet than I’d have thought (I am a creature of habit).

Given another three weeks, I am sure there will be further revelations as I track what I consume.

Being more aware of what we eat both at the moment we choose to eat it, and what our overall food ‘balance sheet’ looks like during any given month, can really help us to make more conscious choices about what we feed ourselves, and be more aware of what the consequences are when we eat things that our bodies don’t appreciate.

If you have any health, stress, concentration or sleep difficulties then the benefits of keeping a food diary will be multiplied!

A few tips to get the most out of a food diary and increased awareness are:

Decide how long you want to keep a food diary for. A few weeks is a great start, and a month will give you a clearer picture of your eating habits.
Pre-plan how you will respond when you “forget” to fill in your food diary (trust me, this will happen – and if you’ve already decided you will keep going when this happens, you’ll make it easier to succeed).
Commit to sharing your food diary with someone either at the end, or at intervals (I’m going to share mine with a nutritionist – so I’ll get a professional opinion about what my eating habits are doing to my body!)
Record things like how tired, alert, grumpy, irritable, well-slept, energetic etc. you are alongside the list of what you have eaten, to help you start noticing any patterns of which foods affect you differently.

Here is a template of the form I’m using (which you can tweak) to make it even easier for you to start!

Even if a food diary is a step you aren’t ready to take, decide what one small thing you can monitor to help you become more food aware. You might want to track the number of glasses of water or cups of coffee/tea you drink, or how many bags of crisps you eat in a week, or how often you crave sweet things.

Your body will thank you for it