在之前的一篇文章中，我讨论了记录食物的好处和缺陷，结论是记录食物摄入量(food intake)有充分的理由。尤其是当我们想减轻体重或保持体重减轻时。但是你如何真正记录你的食物呢？为了帮助你，我想分享我在这个话题上的经验，并讨论几种记录你的食物摄入量(food intake)的策略：
注意：(NOTE:)为了记录我的食物摄入量(food intake)，我最终使用了MyFitnessPal移动应用程序，该应用程序可在所有主要移动平台上使用，包括Windows Phone。
记录你的食物必须成为一种习惯(Must Become A Habit)
食品采伐(Food logging)有其特定的挑战。这是一个必须培养和保持的新习惯。在我们都很脆弱的时候（当我们饿了），它需要良好的记忆力和观察能力。(memory and observation skills)但从这种习惯中获得的数据可能是无价的。我见过这样的案例，通过适当的食物记录本身产生的简单意识产生了奇迹，可以与私人教练或营养师等既定方法相媲美。
首先，您需要有充分的理由进行食物记录(food logging)。请注意(Beware)，您的理由可能会随着时间而改变。我从减肥开始，然后转向更均衡的饮食和关于我吃什么的长期统计数据。
如果没有充分的理由，您可能很快就会对这种习惯失去兴趣。我记得几年前我的健身教练告诉我要写下我吃的东西，而没有详细说明为什么要这样做，以及如何做。我惨遭失败，不到一周就对它失去了兴趣。现在一想到这个我就觉得好笑。我有超过 9 个月的完整数据，我想在某个时候作为开源发布（我之前从 2014 年 3 月发布了我的生物识别数据(my biometrics data from March 2014)）。我会继续把它作为我日常生活的一部分。
何时记录您吃的食物？
最简单的方法是在你吃完饭后立即记录。然而，在某些社会环境中，这可能会变得很尴尬。假设您要和朋友出去吃晚饭，然后您停止与他们的谈话以记录您的食物摄入量(food intake)。经历了几次之后，我决定记住我吃了几个小时的食物，并在有机会的时候输入它。我还是更喜欢在可以的时候在现场做，而且大部分时间都是这样。
我见过的其他策略是：
- 在一天中的固定时刻记录所有内容。这既需要良好的记忆力，又需要有纪律的饮食习惯。从长远来看，经常在两餐之间吃零食会毁了这一点。哦，但是等等，也许你不需要那些零食🙂
- 在吃计划好的饭菜之前记录。这对于为家人做饭（以及食物计划(food planning)）的人来说尤其容易。他们准确地知道他们将吃什么以及什么时候吃。此外，他们非常清楚这些成分是什么以及它们的比例。
- 全天使用纸笔作为缓冲区，然后在预定义的时刻（例如晚上）将其传输到电子表格中。我的智能手机坏了时，我自己也用过这个。
食物记录(food logging)的一个有趣的副作用是你意识到你的食物摄入(food intake)比你想象的要重复得多。这使您可以更好地计划您的膳食，并最终比您想象的更频繁地进入“计划的膳食之前记录”存储桶。
你有另一种记录食物的策略吗？我想听听你的。
不记录食物摄入量(Food Intake)的最常见原因
当然，我们并不总是能够完美地记录我们的食物摄入量。我们需要吗？只要我们对我们吃的东西有很好的了解，可能不会。
以下是您可能停止定期记录食物摄入量的一些原因：(food intake)
一开始，记录你吃的食物可能会非常令人沮丧。我们不知道如何使用智能手机上的移动应用程序或如何有效地搜索食品。我发现MyFitnessPal 应用程序在扫描(MyFitnessPal app)超市商品(supermarket item)条码时特别有效，因为它拥有来自世界各地的庞大食品数据库。此外，它的搜索功能使搜索从市场上购买的商品或找不到条形码的商品非常方便。
- 这需要很多时间。你知道，我采访了几个每天记录食物的人(day basis)。他们都说这真的很容易，只需不到 5 分钟。您确定您一天中没有 5 分钟可以更好地用于投资您的未来吗？
- 现在是早上，我急于上班/开始工作。是的，但没有人说你必须在早餐后立即这样做。你会笑，但如果我堵车，我有时会在开车上班时这样做。您以后可以轻松地记录您的食物，您只需要在吃饭时注意您正在吃的东西并尝试记住它。我将在本文后面提供有关此的详细信息。
- 晚上我真的很累，感觉要崩溃了。你当然知道，我们都知道。这就是为什么睡眠很有用🙂但是如果你吃得太多以至于第二天早上忘记了，或者食物太复杂了，你可能就在那里遇到了问题。我自己，我正在练习间歇性禁食(intermittent fasting)，所以我几乎总是完全不吃晚餐。
- 我正在度假，记录食物感觉就像“工作”（或者我没有适当的互联网连接(internet connection)）。好吧，您可以在度假时使用笔和纸轻松记录您的食物摄入量。(food intake)实际上，我是在 2014 年8 月(August 2014)被迫这样做的，当时我的智能手机冒出烟雾，我在罗马尼亚一个美丽的僻静海滨村庄(beautiful secluded seaside village in Romania)与网络世界完全断开了几天。那时我还在完成减肥(weight loss)，所以一开始我很恐慌。但后来我意识到没有理由不使用笔和纸记录食物并(paper and enter)稍后输入。唯一一次我找不到精神能量去做这件事是在为期 5 天的美国之旅中(USA)它的日程安排得非常紧凑，以至于我几乎无法入睡。
- 我在中国的place/salad bar/tapas bar吃饭，因此品尝了很多食物。是的，这可能意味着您在一顿饭中吃了很多种类的食物，但总的来说，您经常吃的食物种类有多少？不超过20-30，我想。逐步(Gradually)投资将它们一一添加到您正在使用的食物数据库中（MyFitnessPal允许用户生成条目）将使输入您所吃的食物变得更加容易和容易。记住(Remember)，罗马(Rome)不是一天建成的！所以没有理由期望你从第一天起(day one)就能在困难的情况下做对。
我是如何为自己(Myself)养成习惯(Habit)的？
老实说，我把这个当作任何一项创业任务：尽可能少地投入精力并努力取得好成绩。重复直到我对我的食物信息有很好的控制，或者失败(food information or failing)并停止使用相同的策略。
在前两周，我使用了一个谷歌电子表格(Google Spreadsheet)，其中每个单元格对应于一顿饭。我会在单元格中快速写下一些短语，然后当我有时间使用网络卡路里数据库手动估算卡路里时再回来。为什么我会以这种不方便的方式来做呢？我想花尽可能少的精力来学习新软件，了解它的优点和缺点，并且只有在我证明对这样做非常感兴趣之后才能进行更多的投资。
我也有一个非常宽松的目标，即每周吃 12 顿饭（而不是总共大约 21 顿）。这是因为我坚信可持续的小增量。因此，我确保自己不会因为一开始没有得到所有的饭菜而感到内疚，而是控制了自己的期望。作为一个有竞争力的人，我很快就超过了我的每周目标，并且在一个月内我几乎记录了所有内容。
在这段学习期间，我意识到有几件事：
- 减肥(Weight loss)主要是饮食计划(food planning)和了解自己的问题。
- 有些人避免食物记录(food logging)，因为它“占用时间”和“不准确”。这就是Healbe GoBe等许多蒸汽器皿产品声称可以解决这个看似重要的问题的原因。但事实上，您并不需要完全准确的数据，只要有足够的好处，您就会愿意手动输入数据。
- 你反复吃同样的东西比你想象的更频繁。MyFitnessPal通过为每餐保留一份随时可用的最常用食物清单，在这方面为您提供帮助。
估计你的食物摄入量的建议(Food Intake)
首先(First)，沉迷前要学会看盘。在记录我的食物一两个月后，我发现自己在早餐时扫描了盘子里的东西。我还发现，在外出就餐时，我在点菜后和他们带来之前输入了食物，只是因为菜单中提供了主要成分的数量。这特别容易做到，因为我很快就决定要得到什么，并且能够在其他人仍在决定的时候记录下来。然后我决定有意识地去做。只需要一点意志（即使你饿了的冲动很强烈）。
这使我学会了一项非常重要的技能：仅通过观察来估计食物的数量（“目测”）。稍后我将详细介绍如何训练该肌肉。目视扫描食物可以让我稍后记录它，如果我没有立即做或不想做的话。这与我的个人理念非常吻合，即在开始新的一天时，您应该不惜一切代价避免拖延最紧迫的问题。
它也让我更好地了解我整体吃的东西。以前，我会在我的盘子里装满 1 或 2 种配料，然后继续回到冰箱里再装一些。这种来回干扰(back and forth disturbed)了我与和我一起吃饭的人的谈话，也让我完全不知道到底是什么东西进入了我的肚子。
在教人们如何在外出就餐时记录他们的食物时，我发现在食用前对食物进行视觉扫描以确定哪些是应该记录的主要成分以及它们的数量非常有用。
我发现食物记录(food logging)的一个很好的副作用是我现在倾向于吃更简单的食物。也许我懒得记录更复杂的，但我重新发现了很多我完全忘记的简单口味。
现在，关于数量。正确的食物记录意味着识别正确的成分并输入正确的食用量。当我开始记录我的食物时，我想开发一种可持续的方法来估计对我在家和外出时都有帮助的食物数量。(food quantity)这意味着我不能依赖电子秤，除了训练我的估计技能。一些对我有帮助的观察：
- 你不是在寻找完美。您正在寻找与统计相关的食物数量。在我的例子中，统计相关意味着我可以从我的食物日志(food log)数据和卡路里燃烧数据开始以一个不错的(calorie burn)错误率(error rate)预测我的实际体重。
- 考虑高估（用于减肥和维持(weight-loss and maintenance)）或低估（用于增重(weight gaining)）。由于我处于第一个桶中，因此我经常高估 10-15%（可能除了您使用电子秤称重的情况）。
- 选择不是异常值的食物版本。该条目应包含所有主要成分（蛋白质、纤维、脂肪等），并且卡路里的数量不应过低/过高。我自己，我消除了最低和最高值，并选择了中间以上的某个地方。这解释了同一道菜的不同烹饪风格。例如，炸薯条可能含有更多或更少的油，并用向日葵或棕榈油烹制。
如何将食物(Food Into)解构为配料
食物估计(Food estimation)分解为估计单一成分。为什么？科学家们才刚刚开始努力了解烹饪和准备(cooking and preparation)对老鼠的影响，而不是对人类的影响。有关将一种或多种成分一起烹饪如何影响卡路里总数的研究，请参见此处(here)和此处。(here)但这些初步实验都没有显示出生料和熟料之间的差异超过 10-15%，而对于业余级食品记录统计相关性而言，错误率就足够了。(error rate)
每当我吃更复杂的食物时，我都会尝试评估它的主要成分（那些为它贡献更多卡路里的成分）。通过高估它们的数量（就像我之前提到的），我也能够解释制备方法(preparation method)的效果。如果我有一个忙碌的一天或真的很累，我只会记录前 2-3 种成分，以便粗略估计我在吃什么。正如本文前面提到的，食物记录(food logging)会带来意识，这将导致您吃更简单的食物，从而从长远来看减少此类情况的数量。
举一个简单的例子，在芝士汉堡中，您将主要对面包(bread bun)、肉饼(meat pattie)、奶酪本身、培根和任何酱汁（如果数量不可忽略）感兴趣。
如何估计你正在吃的食物(Food)数量(Quantity)
对于数量，我首先通过从超市购买包装食品并使用较大包装的四舍五入细分（例如四分之一，二分之一）来目视观察主要食品成分的密度。我还把空盘子拿在手里，把实际的配料放在盘子里，以了解配料的实际重量在你手上的感觉。请注意，这最适用于较轻的塑料盘子。我知道，这不环保，但这是一个学习的过程！
在我进行食物记录(food logging)3 个月后，我的妻子收到了一个电子秤作为礼物。到那时我已经在家里、工作中以及外出度假或出差(vacation or business trips)时记录食物，所以我很自然地开始自己使用它。我主要用它来训练我的称重技巧，尤其是对于更难的配料。一个很好的例子是鳄梨，它的种子占总重量的很大一部分。通过使用量表，我了解到我夸大了我对鳄梨的高估。
结论和个人结果
我怎么知道这些技术有效？好吧，虽然在今年减掉了 23 公斤（50 磅）的体重，但我将我的预期体重（使用卡路里燃烧和食物日志(food log)的数据）与我的实际体重作了对比。
如您所见，估计效果很好！图表末尾出现的差异是由于前面提到的高估技术。(over-estimation technique)
记录食物(Food logging)是一种日常习惯，一旦你接受了良好的训练，每天最多可能需要 5 分钟。有很多挑战，从养成习惯开始，到从食物数据库(food database)中正确选择成分，再到估计它们的数量。最后但并非最不重要的一点是，像往常一样，商务旅行和假期会扰乱我们的日常生活。
记录我的食物 9 个月是一段疯狂的旅程，我对自己和我的习惯有了很多了解！我已经描述了我所有的小挣扎，所有的小胜利（目不转睛，高估，能够预测我的体重）。如果像我这样的前反对者可以在每天 5 分钟内做到这一点，你也可以做到！
Andrei Ismail 是一位经验丰富的软件工程师，拥有创业经验和人工智能博士学位。他在 6 个月内减掉了 50 磅。(Andrei Ismail is an experienced software engineer with startup experience under his belt and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence. He has lost 50 pounds in 6 months.)
Real-Life Strategies For Logging Your Food Intake
In a previous article I have discussed about the benefits and pitfalls of logging your food and the conclusion was that there is ample reason for one to log the food intake. Especially when we want to lose some weight or to maintain that lost weight. Bυt how dо you actuallу log your food? To help you, I would like to share my experience on this topic and discuss several strategies for lоgging your food intake:
NOTE: In my quest for logging my food intake, I ended up using the MyFitnessPal mobile app, which is available on all major mobile platforms, including Windows Phone.
Logging Your Food Must Become A Habit
Food logging has its specific challenges. It's a new habit that has to be created and maintained. It needs good memory and observation skills during a time in which we're all vulnerable (when we're hungry). But the data obtained from this habit can be priceless. I have seen cases where the simple awareness created by proper food logging itself has worked wonders, rivaling established methods such as personal trainers or nutritionists.
Before anything, you need to have a very good reason to do food logging. Beware that your reason might change over time. I started out with weight loss, and migrated towards a more balanced diet and longer term statistics about what I eat.
Without a good reason, you may lose interest in this habit pretty quickly. I remember my fitness coach telling me a few years ago to write down what I eat, without getting into any details about why do it, and how to do it. I failed miserably and lost interest in it in less than a week. Now I feel amused when I think about that. I have over 9 months of complete data that I want to publish at some point as open-source (I previously published my biometrics data from March 2014). And I will keep doing it as part of my daily routine.
When To Log The Food That You Eat?
The easiest way is to log it immediately after you eat. However, this might turn out to be awkward in certain social contexts. Consider you are going out with friends for dinner and you stop the conversation with them to log your food intake. Having put myself through this a couple of times, I decided to remember the food I ate for a couple of hours instead and enter it when I have the chance. I still prefer to do it on the spot when I can, and that is most of the time.
Other strategies I have seen are:
- Logging everything in a fixed moment of the day. This requires both having a pretty good memory and disciplined eating habits. Frequent between-meal snacks will ruin this in the long term. Oh, but wait, maybe you don't need those snacks anyway 🙂
- Logging before eating the meals that are planned. This is especially easy for people who are doing the cooking (and thus the food planning) for their family. They know with precision what they will be eating and when. Also, they know very well what the ingredients are and their proportions.
- Using pen-and-paper as a buffer throughout the day, that is then transferred at a predefined moment (say, evening) into the electronic form. I myself used this while my smartphone was broken.
One interesting side-effect of food logging is that you realise that your food intake is much more repetitive than you ever thought. Which allows you to plan for your meals better and end up in the "logging before the meals that are planned" bucket more frequently than you think.
Do you have an alternative strategy for logging your food? I would like to hear about yours.
The Most Frequent Reasons For Not Logging Your Food Intake
Of course, we are not always able to log our food intake perfectly. Do we need to? As long as we have a very good understanding of what we eat, probably not.
Here are some of the reasons why you may stop logging your food intake on a regular basis:
At the very beginning it can be very frustrating to log the food that you eat. We do not know how to use the mobile app on our smartphone or how to search for food items efficiently. I have found the MyFitnessPal app to be particularly effective when scanning supermarket item barcodes because it has a huge database of foods from around the world. Also, its search feature makes it quite comfortable to search for items bought from the market or whose barcodes are not found.
- It takes a lot of time. You know, I have interviewed a couple of people who do log their food on a day to day basis. All of them say it is really easy and takes under 5 minutes. Are you sure you don't have 5 minutes in your day that could be better spent by investing in your future?
- It's morning and I am in a rush to get to work/to start work. Yes, but nobody says you have to do it immediately after breakfast. You will laugh, but I sometimes do it while driving to work if I get stuck in traffic. You can easily log your food later, you just have to pay attention to what you are eating while you are eating and try to remember it. I will provide details about this later in the article.
- In the evening I am really tired and feel like crashing. Of course you do, we all do. That is why sleep is useful 🙂 But if you are eating too much to remember the next morning, or the foods are too complicated, you might have your problem right there. Myself, I am practicing intermittent fasting so I almost always skip dinner completely.
- I am on vacation, and logging the food feels like "work" (or I don't have a proper internet connection). Well, you can easily log your food intake while in vacation by using pen and paper. I was actually forced to do that in August 2014 when smoke came out of my smartphone and I was left completely disconnected from the online world for several days in a beautiful secluded seaside village in Romania. I was still finishing my weight loss back then, so at first I panicked. But I then realised there is no reason not to log the food using pen and paper and enter it later. The only time when I could just not find mental energy to do it was during a 5-day trip to the USA which had a schedule so packed that I barely got to sleep at all.
- I am eating at a chinese place/salad bar/tapas bar and thus am tasting quite a lot of foods. Yes, this can mean that you eat a lot of types of foods in one meal, but overall, how many types can there be that you eat regularly? Not more than 20-30, I presume. Gradually investing in adding them one by one to the database of foods that you are using (MyFitnessPal allows user-generated entries) will make it easier and easier to enter what you eat. Remember, Rome wasn't built in a day! So there is no reason to expect that you will get it right in difficult circumstances from day one.
How I Managed To Create The Habit For Myself?
Honestly, I treated this one as any startup task: investing as little energy as possible and trying to obtain good results. Repeating until I had good control over my food information or failing and stopping to use the same strategy.
In the first 2 weeks, I used a Google Spreadsheet where each cell corresponded to a meal. I would quickly scribble some phrase in the cell and get back later when I had time to estimate the calories by hand, using a web calories database. Why did I do it in such an inconvenient way? I wanted to spend as little mental energy as possible to learn new software, its strengths and weaknesses, and only after I proved to be very interested in doing it to invest more.
I also had a very relaxed target of filling 12 meals per week (instead of the total of approximately 21). This was because I am a big believer in small increments that are sustainable. Therefore, I made sure that I did not feel guilty for not getting all the meals at first, but rather managed my own expectations. Being the competitive person that I am, I exceeded my weekly goal pretty quickly, and within a month I was logging almost everything.
What I realised during this learning period were several things:
- Weight loss is mostly a problem of food planning and knowing yourself.
- Some people avoid food logging because it "takes up time" and "it is inaccurate". That is the reason for a number of vaporware products such as the Healbe GoBe that claimed to solve this seemingly important problem. But in fact you do not need perfectly accurate data, and given a good enough benefit, you will be willing to enter the data by hand.
- You repeatedly eat the same stuff more often than you think. MyFitnessPal helps you in that respect by keeping a readily available list of the most frequently used foods for every meal.
Recommendations For Estimating Your Food Intake
First of all, learn to look at the plate before indulging. One or two months into logging my food, I found myself scanning the contents of the plate during breakfast. I've also discovered that when eating out, I entered the food after ordering and before they brought it just because the main ingredient quantities were available in the menu. That was especially easy to do since I decide very quickly what to get and am able to log it while other people are still deciding. Then I decided to do it consciously. It only takes a bit of will (even though the impulse when you are hungry is quite strong).
This has led me to learn a very important skill: estimating the quantity of food just by looking at it ("eyeballing"). I will detail later how to train that muscle. Visually scanning the food allows me to log it later, if I do not immediately have time to do it or do not want to. This plays nicely with my personal philosophy that you should avoid delaying the most pressing issues when starting the day at any cost.
It also gives me a better overview of what I am eating as a whole. Previously, I would fill my plate with 1 or 2 ingredients, and keep going back to the fridge to fill it some more. This back and forth disturbed my conversation with the people eating with me and also made me completely unaware of what was actually going into my belly.
While teaching people how to log their food when eating out, I've found it quite useful to visually scan the food before eating it to determine which are the main ingredients that should be logged, and their quantities.
One nice side-effect of food logging that I found is that I tend to eat much simpler foods right now. Maybe I'm too lazy to log the more complex ones, but I rediscovered a lot of simple tastes that I had completely forgotten about.
Now, onto the quantities. Correct food logging means identifying the right ingredients and entering the correct quantities that you are eating. As I started to log my food, I wanted to develop a sustainable method to estimate the food quantity that would help me both at home and when away. This means that I cannot rely on the electronic scale, except for training my estimating skills. Some observations that were helpful for me:
- You are not looking for perfection. You are looking for statistically relevant food quantities. In my case, statistically relevant meant that I could predict my actual weight with a decent error rate starting from my food log data and calorie burn data.
- Consider over-estimation (for weight-loss and maintenance), or under-estimation (for weight gaining). Since I am in the first bucket, I constantly over-estimate with 10-15% (except maybe for the case when you are weighing them using an electronic scale).
- Choose a version of the food that is not an outlier. The entry should have all the main ingredients entered (proteins, fibers, fats, etc.) and also should not have a disproportionately low/high number of calories. Myself, I eliminate the lowest and highest values and choose somewhere above the middle. This accounts for the different styles of cooking for the same dish. For example, french fries might contain more oil or less, and be cooked with sunflower or palm oil.
How To Deconstruct Food Into Ingredients
Food estimation breaks down to estimating a single ingredient. Why? Scientists are just beginning to struggle to understand the effects of cooking and preparation on raw ingredients on mice and not yet on humans. See here and here for studies on how cooking one or more multiple ingredients together affects the total number of calories. But none of these preliminary experiments show a difference of more than 10-15% between the raw ingredient and the cooked ones, and that error rate for the purpose of amateur-level food logging statistical relevance is enough.
Whenever I eat a more complex food, I try to evaluate its main ingredients (the ones which contribute more calories to it). And by overestimating their quantities (just like I mentioned before), I am also able to account for the effect of the preparation method. If I am having a busy day or am really tired, I will only log the top 2-3 ingredients in order to have a rough estimate of what I am eating. As mentioned earlier in this article, food logging brings awareness with it that will cause you to eat simpler foods, thus decreasing the number of such situations in the longer term.
To give one quick example, in a cheeseburger you will be interested mainly in the bread bun, the meat pattie, the cheese itself, bacon and any sauce (if it is in a non-negligible amount).
How To Estimate The Quantity Of Food That You Are Eating
For the quantity, I started out by visually observing the density of the main food ingredients by buying packaged food from the supermarket and using up rounded subdivisions of the bigger package (e.g. one fourth, one half). I also held the empty plate into my hand, and put the actual ingredient in the plate to learn how the actual weight of the ingredient feels on your hand. Note that this works best with plastic dishes, which are lighter. I know, it's not environmentally friendly, but it's a learning process!
3 months into my food logging, my wife received an electronic scale as a gift. By that time I was already logging food at home, at work, and while I was away on vacation or business trips, so naturally I started to use it myself. I mainly use it to train my weighing skills, especially for more difficult ingredients. One good example here is the avocado, whose seed weighs a very significant amount of the total weight. By using the scale, I learned that I was exaggerating my over-estimations of the avocado.
Conclusion & Personal Results
How do I know these techniques work? Well, while losing 23 kg (50 pounds) of weight during this year, I plotted my expected weight (using data from calorie burns and the food log) against my actual weight.
As you can see, the estimation works quite well! The emerging difference towards the end of the graph is due to the over-estimation technique previously mentioned.
Food logging is a daily habit that can take up to 5 minutes per day once you are well trained in doing it. There are a lot of challenges, starting from creating the habit, to correctly selecting the ingredients from the food database, and estimating their quantities. Last but not least, business trips and vacations, as usual, disrupt our routine.
Logging my food for 9 months has been a wild ride, with so much I have learned about myself and my habits! I have described all my small struggles, and all the small victories (eyeballing, over-estimation, being able to predict my weight). If a former naysayer like me can do it in under 5 minutes a day, you can do it too!
Andrei Ismail is an experienced software engineer with startup experience under his belt and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence. He has lost 50 pounds in 6 months.
