Every now and then I decide to write down exactly what I eat and drink in order to update my understanding of how my daily calorie intake looks like on the macronutrient and micronutrient level. Each time I’ve done it, I’ve found something that has surprised me.

I mainly try to eat nutrient dense, minimally processed (i.e. low refined) plant-based food with lots of fibers. Thanks to this “baseline” I’m quite confident that I get enough of most of the vitamins and minerals I should be getting, except perhaps for B12 and calcium. But you never know, and these are exactly the insights I’m hoping to gain by keeping a food journal.

I’m also interested in seeing what I might be getting too much of (besides caffeine, sigh). In particular I’d like to see how much (and what kind of) fat I get. The same goes for salt, or rather sodium, which seems to sneak in from all kinds of unexpected sources.

It is however almost impossible to keep a food diary for a prolonged period of time. I think my record is about 10 days in a row. It’s very time consuming and boring to enter all ingredients that go into something as simple as a salad and everything should be weighed if you want to have precise results. The moment you eat something you haven’t prepared yourself, say a take-away lunch or a dinner with friends at a restaurant, your data will be inaccurate.

Even if you’d have an app with fantastic image recognitioning and state-of-the-art machine learning, it would still be almost impossible to get many things right. How could the app know how much salt and olive oil is in the food, unless you actually sample the food? I’m not saying an app like this would be completely useless, on the contrary. It could easily take care of a lot of monotonous data inputting. Example: just take a photo of the carrots you’re about to chop and the app can input 150 grams of carrots to your food diary.

Currently I’m using an app called Cronometer for food journaling and it has a comprehensive database on ingredients you’ll find in your local grocery store. Planning on cooking gluten-free spaghetti by Barilla? No problem, it’s there. What about Tesco’s organic red kidney beans? Yep, it’s there, and so on.

At the moment, as many are working from home and obviously also cooking a lot of food at home, it’s probably going to be slightly easier to keep a food journal for a week or so. Today is my fifth day in a row and let’s see how far I get.

One concrete thing that comes directly as a consequence from food journaling is that you almost automatically eat less snacks and “unnecessary” things during the day. All of those would have to go into the diary and therefore, just as your hand is reaching for a protein bar, your mind says “wait a second, you’d have to log that as well”. No wonder they say that keeping a food journal is one of the most effective ways of controlling your weight.