365 Days of Food

The title of this blog was intended to reflect a goal of photographing what I ate for 365 days, as a way of honing my food photography skills.Unfortunately, I still have never finished those 365 posts of food photography.

However, I have just finished keeping track of every single thing I've eaten over the past year, recording my meals in an app called MyFitnessPal. I started on August 20th, 2012 and have recorded everything I've consumed since then.

I started tracking what I ate in order to help me lose weight - my goal was to lose 30 pounds in five months. Using the app to track my food, I met my goal and have lost an additional 10 pounds in the months since. It definitely worked. Losing weight, to me, wasn't a matter of dieting, because I knew that as soon as I completed the diet that I would go back to my old eating habits and put on all the weight again. So I had to completely changed my approach to eating.

And I have a complete record of that change, and I thought it would be interesting to both analyze the data and share it. And even though the original purpose of this blog might not suggest that this is the perfect spot for that, this blog's name says it is.

So here is a summary of everything I've eaten in the past year:

There are several things you'll notice. One, I drink a lot of wine. Two, I have basically given up on sweets. When you change your lifestyle and the way you eat in order to lose - and keep off - weight, you have to make choices. I chose cheese over ice cream and wine over cake.

I still enter everything I eat into the app because I know if I don't, I'll immediately start to slip - an extra piece of pizza here, an extra glass of wine there. Pretty soon, I'll have put on 10 pounds. So it really is a lifestyle change, not a diet.