I've given up on my food diary again! Ok well -
I think I mentioned a while back that I made up a template for a daily food/exercise/health diary booklet. I printed out the templates, stapled them together into a booklet, and took it with me to work and home. I filled it in faithfully for about a month. It worked pretty well. It was handy for work, portable and easy to fill in. However, as with all my previous food diaries, there was only one issue - the act of filling it in and recording everything didn't actually change what I ate! What purpose is a food diary for? How is it supposed to work? Is it supposed to make you aware of what you're eating? And by extension, change what you eat? Is it supposed to make you too ashamed to eat anything unhealthy because you'd have to admit it by recording it for all posterity?
Well, none of that worked for me. I ate and then wrote down chocolates, lollies, cakes, big chunks of rocky road; all without thinking about it for even one second. I did faithfully write them all down, but I didn't think at all about differentiating between different types of foods (i.e. foods that it's OK to eat a lot vs. foods that I should only be eating occasionally, if at all). It was all just the same.
So the only conclusion I can come to is that keeping a food diary is a waste of time for me. It doesn't have the desired effect. So that's it! I'm not gonna do it anymore!
However, there's just one little niggling thing with that. When I do eat healthy foods, I want to acknowledge it. Feel good about it and reward myself (not with more food though! eheheh). I don't know why, but I just thought I should call them 'Foods that Support my Long-Term Happiness'. That has an element of mindfulness to it that I think I really need. I could post them on the blog. But I don't want it to become an interminably boring roster of my most base, mundane daily habits. Although I'm sure it's already quite dull. (Sorry, I don't know why my writing is so melodramatic at the moment!)
So anyway, enough blathering on. I ate the following Foods that Supported my Long-Term Happiness yesterday: natural yoghurt with fresh paw paw for breakfast, carrot sticks for morning tea; green coffee with lunch; a banana for afternoon tea.
Healthy Behaviours: I didn't eat the chocolate! Day 2 of not eating the chocolate. Did a toning workout in the evening while waiting for dinner to cook (admittedly it was pretty short, but definitely a good step forwards).
And today (so far): whole wheat cereal with fresh paw paw for breakfast. Carrot sticks for morning tea. Though they tend to give me a stomach ache, so I might have to re-think.
Meanwhile...
This morning I wasn't feeling so good as I did yesterday. Not much energy, feeling a bit blah. Hump day. Still, things aren't so bad, because I can successfully cheer myself up by telling myself that things aren't so bad.
I really want to buy something. I'm on a spending ban this month. Husband and I need to save money at the moment. I've been pretty good too, I think. I only bought a scarf to replace my favourite one that I lost, and 2 tops from the same site which were on sale. Also, 2 books from the book depository during their 24-hour sale, which were under $5 each. Actually, the sale was quite fun: on their homepage they put up one book per hour which was insanely cheap. Most of them sold out pretty quick, so they put up back-up books until the next hour started. Of course, many of them were ones I wasn't interested in, but I'm surprised I managed to hold back and only get 2. Unfortunately I only found out about the sale when it was nearly over, probably a good thing, really! The books haven't arrived yet. Now I'm really, really tempted to go to the "all books $5 shop" near my work at lunch time. It's had a 'closing down sale' sign on it for the last couple of weeks. One part of me says 'wait til next week, then it'll be July and your spending ban will be officially over'. Another part of me says, 'you should go this week, today! It might close down any day now, and it's end of financial year, it probably won't be open next week and you'll miss out! Not only that, but you have to go today, because you're too busy the rest of the week! So it has to be today!'.
Dilemmas!
