"I hardly ate anything"

Well, as usual, as soon as I publish an article, along comes more information and better ideas about the same subject - this time I'm talking about the note I wrote on "will power".

The message I was after in the "will power" post was that I was just going to have to suck it up, get control of myself, and eat that salad instead of those tasty, high glyceimc index, cheeseburgers and hardroll sandwiches. But of course, that is not really the issue, and I am forever thankful to Charles Platkin for pointing it out to me. [Mr Platkin has a great site called the dietdetective.com which has more great nutrition articles and ideas than you can posssibly read in an afternoon, probably a week of afternoons.]

Anway, Mr Platkin published a column in my local newspaper - "The Westerly Sun" [July 31, 2006] which I can find neither at the Westerly Sun [which has its own great health section] nor on dietdetective.com. So I will have to paraphrase the article:

"... The New England Journal of Medicine [reported] that people attempting to lose weight tend to underestimate the amount they eat by 47%... " In particular 86% of women underestimated how much they ate in a 24 hour study period by an average of 621 calories, and 60% of men underestimated their food intake by an average 581 calories. The American cancer society found only 1% of participants could correctly estimate a portion size when asked to do so.

So there's the problem: I don't keep an accurate, timely, accounting of what I eat outside my home.

When I left that picnic recently, I told my wife "I hardly ate anything, I'm sure I'll be fine when I add it up." Whoops! When I added up those "asprin" burgers, remembered what I really had for seconds, imagined what I had on my plate compared to a tennis ball (a tennis ball = a 1 cup serving, right?), well, I was way over.

And when I left that business meeting lunch, I knew I had eaten "too many" of those hard roll sandwiches, but it wasn't until I got home that I figured I had eaten six of them!

So where am I at? Right back at the Hacker's Diet with my defective "fullness" signals, only this time on a very short term, immediate basis. But it is important to know (or more accurately be reminded) that it's NOT a question of "will power", it's a question of having an accurate idea of how much I have eaten at any given time.

When I'm at home, I fill in my calorie log as I go, and I adjust what I eat as the day progresses - and I really don't have any problem staying within my calorie goals. So it's clear that when I go out I am going to have to keep a running total of what I eat and an estimate of the calories. If I do that I think I may be able to keep control of my calorie intake. Thank goodness it's not a question of "will power" - I don't have any.

Oh yeah, and what does Mr Platkin, the diet detective, recommend: "keep track of everything you eat... even one grape". In other words, a calorie log, what else!?