Quitting Junk Food

doughnuts

I recently wrote about my New Year’s resolution of not quitting things, and it has taken me a while to figure out what to start. I could get into this circular logic loop and try to explain why I haven’t picked something yet, but that seems like a waste of pixels. Whatever, here goes.

For the next 30 days, I’m going to be eating healthier. I’m going to try this for one month, evaluate, and iterate. From today until Feb 26, each day, I am going to do the following:

  • Track my eating on MyFitnessPal (MFP)
  • Try to hit the following general numbers:
    • Calories - 1800
    • Carbs - 180
    • Fat - 60
    • Protein - 135
    • Cholesterol - 300
    • Sugar - 70
  • For any day where I’m within 10% of every number, I will count that day as a success
  • I will use a habit tracking app to track successful days
  • Success of this goal will be 23 successful days of the 30

If you’d like to connect on MFP, my username there is emil10001.

Now for some questions to help me set exepctations. Doing something like this actually becomes harder when you write publicly about it, because you get feedback that your brain interprets the same way as it does if you’d actually accomplished the thing.

Why don’t I do this already, what are the barriers? Logging food in MFP every day is time consuming and cumbersome. I’m going ot try to cut down on how much effort it takes to do this, by creating recipes and standard meals that I can reuse and quickly enter. I also occasionally enjoy baking and eating sweets. I’m not saying that I’m going to cut this out completely, but I’ll at least be more consious of its impact, by logging those foods and cutting back as needed.

Alcohol is another one that could do with another round of cuts. I typically drink Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout, which is by far my favorite beer, but also around 300 calories per bottle. While I have significantly cut down my alcohol intake since the summer, I could afford to cut it further, even without cutting it out completely. Again, every time I drink it, I’m going to log it, and cut back as needed.

Why do I feel the need to do this now? What is the goal? What’s my motivation? This is something that I’ve been doing something off and on for years. It’s not new. My goals are basically two-fold, first to lose some excess weight, and second to feel better overall and be healthier. I feel like this is one of those little things that can really have a big impact on my daily mood, and how I feel about myself.

I have noticed in the past, that eating well tends to improve my mood, and how I feel about myself. Successfully doing this helps to motivate me to do other things that I want to do. I think that it is one of the most basic, simple things that I can do that will have a large impact.

It is going to be difficult to cut down on the junk, especially cutting down enough to get within 10% of my daily goals. But, I think that if I can allow myself to fail a little, and keep going, then I think that I will be able to complete this goal.