Honesty and Awareness

To most effectively make a change you need to know where you are starting from; how do you know what you are changing if you don't know what you started with? Knowing what you can about your food and drink intake and current eating habits gives you a place to start.

Perhaps start by keeping a food log for a few days. Keep it super simple at first: if it goes in your mouth it goes on the paper. Eat what and how you would normally eat—don't change or omit anything because you are unsure or might feel embarrassed by it, and don't worry about timing or portions or other patterns yet; that comes later, as you will learn. Keeping an accurate log means honesty and consistency. Until you are honest with yourself and consistently know what is going on you won't know what might need changing; never mind actually changing it.

Once honesty is established and as awareness is building you may start adding pieces, perhaps:

How much you are eating; this brings things like serving sizes and calorie approximation into the picture.

What types of food you are eating; this brings things like nutrients and things like carbs fats and proteins, and vitamins and minerals into the picture.

When you are eating; this brings things like your daily routine, weekly rituals, and social settings into the picture.

Who else in your environment influences your eating; this brings things like spousal habits, children complications, co-worker handouts, and peer and familial pressure into the picture.

What in your environment influences your eating; this brings things like availability factors such as the café along your commute, deli on your lunch break, watering hole after work, and office grazing into the picture.

Your ingrained biases and blind spots; this brings things like things you have always done or known or believed to be true into the picture.

There are all of those and a million other potentially relevant and overlapping factors. Learning about those factors and effectively changing yourself takes time. You are the result of all the years you have lived and the decisions you have made and you can't change those results overnight.

Regardless of your nutritional needs and goals effectively changing starts with honesty about and an awareness of where and how you are now; and part of that process means accepting there are things you don't know, and that while others can help, only you are responsible for changing you.

July 2020