It is so important to truly know how much food we eat on a daily basis, especially if we have any sort of goal focused on fat loss or physique development. Most of us are god awful at estimating the number of calories we eat in a day. We either forget to add those small indulgences we had at the office, or outright simply have no clue what a 4 ounce portion of hamburger is.
So, I decided I would take a picture of everything that I ate yesterday and post it here today. I also logged into myfitnesspal.com and logged all the calories too. I’m currently in a maintenance phase with my goals which works well as my wife and I are expecting baby girl to be here in less than a month.
I’ve found that with my goal of maintenance, I can eat about 2500 calories daily, so that is more or less what I typically shoot for. Now I’ll be honest, I don’t track what I eat everyday and I have a pretty solid idea of the portions that I eat. I judge my calorie intake by eye at this point.
However, I don’t recommend everyone doing that. I can fairly accurately judge how many calories I eat in a day just by sight, in large part because I’ve been devoted to learning the art and science of weight loss for the past 14 years. Not only have I been at it a long time, but I also routinely eat a lot of the same foods, many of which are not too big on combinations, which makes it fairly easy for me to judge the calorie content. The reason I don’t recommend most people do it this way is because if you haven’t been very in tune with what you eat for a very long time, we usually grossly underestimate our daily calories.
It just isn’t something that we do well with historically. Most of the recent research I believe, points to us being off by as much as 50% when we recall our daily calorie intake. I even read that a study done with registered dietitians, you know those folks who should know everything about food, still have a pretty big error when it comes to eyeballing.
The take home point, don’t just rely on eyeballing foods. I’m not suggesting you log your food everyday the rest of your life, that’s not necessarily realistic either, but you should do it regularly so you have an idea of what your daily calorie intake is. There may be a bit more to the story than just calories, but for now it’s the first and most important thing to focus on.
I typically start my mornings with a cup of coffee and a touch of cream, and I usually have a second cup at work. Total Calorie Value = 124, Cumulative Intake= 124
Then I’m usually off to lift and after I have a shake with two scoops of whey and a half cup of oats with water. Total Calorie Value= 450, Cumulative Intake= 574
Then late morning, I eat three eggs, some cheese, spinach, and at times of random veggies in our fridge. This also includes a pat of butter that I use to cook them in (an easy one to forget) Total Calorie Value=335, Cumulative Intake= 909
Next, is lunch and yesterday it was an approximate 4 ounce hamburger with a piece of cheese and some carrots. Then I got into some girl scout cookies, a roll of smarties, and a buckeye. The sweets were at work and even the best among us can’t resist chocolate and peanut butter sometimes. I also placed my burger next to my mouse at work, just for scale of the hamburger. Total calorie value=604, Cumulative Intake= 1513
Lastly, I finished off with a cobb salad from a local restaurant with a good friend of mine before heading to watch the Blues lose againse Dallas last night: This is one of those combination foods where you really have no idea the total calories. This local chain doesn’t have nutrition information on their website so I guessed as best I could from the available data in myfitnesspal.com. Total Calorie Value= 1160, Cumulative Intake= 2673.
Pretty close to 2500 but I did go a bit over. While being in maintenance going a bit over isn’t a big deal, but if you are working with a calorie deficit of 300-500 calories then going over 173 can derail a fat loss program pretty quickly. Also, 2673 is just an approximation. We can’t really ever know exactly what our intake was, so while my salad came in at 1160 calories it easily could have been 1500, and I have no way of knowing.
While taking a picture of your foods can help you be honest about what you’ve eaten, don’t get carried away with it. The idea here is just to be educated about the foods you eat, not to develop some sort of obsessive compulsive disorder around your eating.