Food Journaling Requirements

An individualized approach to optimizing your diet

In this article I aim to highlight why tracking your food is important and expand upon what you should track and why you should track it.

If something is not going right, or we aren't where we want to be, we need to adjust and in order for us to make an adjustment, we first need an awareness, a certain amount of knowledge that allows us to navigate forward in the most efficient way.

This is what tracking/ journaling your food allows you to do. Map out a plan and follow the route as closely as possible, making adjustments along the way.   

Let's say for example you are driving to a friends house and you are going the wrong way, until you are made aware of your misdirection you wont change course, will eventually stray further away and may drive around for hours leading to frustration and even giving up (made more frustrating when other people are telling you you are wrong without much...

Covid. The reason you wear sweat pants to work, that is if you even bother to wear pants anymore and the the reason why online coaching and remote programing has taken a step into the limelight. 

As with anything health related, there is an abundance of choice and stress associated with the decision making progress, so to help you navigate through this landscape of seductive marketing and somewhat endless variety, I have put together 5 questions you should ask to create clarity around what is right for you!

1. What do you want. 

Remember the scene from The Notebook? When Ryan Gosling pleads with Rachel McAdams to tell him what she wants? Well that's what you need to decide. What do you actually want, what do you value and what are you willing to commit your time, energy and effort to?

Stop playing with our emotions and being indecisive and tell us the truth! 

2. What do you enjoy?

Improving your health requires a certain amount of behavior change. This in of it...

If I told you I could help you lose 20lbs in 24 hours would you be interested?

I hope not, in fact I would hope you ran away! Far far away! 

You may ask can this even be done?

And the answer is yes, yes it can. In fact its done on a daily basis by 1000s of people competing in combat sports.

In this world of combat sports many athletes go through a 'weight cut', during which an athlete can lose up anywhere from 5-30 lbs in weight over a period of a few days.

It is often referred to as the fight before the fight and is a grueling process of dehydration, pain and comes with potential serious health risks!

Due to the system of categorizing athletes into weight classes to avoid unfair physical advantages and ensure the bout is a display of talent and not just physical superiority, athletes go through these weight cuts to try to take advantage of these weight categories so they can fight in a division below there actual fighting weight.

For example, an athlete competing at...

What is the most important thing when it comes to successfully implementing a Nutrition plan and getting results?

When trying to navigate the baffling world of nutrition and decipher what is right and wrong for our body it is more than easy to be debilitated by the sheer mass of information and the conflicting views from equally respected experts.

Spend 30 minutes researching diets and or nutrition and tell me how many different approaches, supplements and success stories you encounter.

…..confusing right!? 

So how on earth are you supposed to make an informed decision and TRUST and BELIEVE that it will work?

Well you can’t.

You will not know whether something will work for you until you actually do it.

You can seek guidance, coaching, do your own research and reading but until you actually give it a go, you won’t know whether or not it will work for you.

Which brings me to my opinion on what the most...

Apparently, my dad has become a Peloton aficionado in the last month since my parents got one. Ashley often takes breaks between work and studying to ride one in our apartment gym. Everyone seems to think it’s fun. They even talk about the trainer’s personalities like they know them.

Months ago, I’m on the phone with one of my clients discussing metrics for consumer satisfaction for a site I made for my dissertation. He’s a venture capitalist who has investments in fitness technology, so I wanted to pick his brain. The goal of my research is to get novices to strength train.

“So, the goal is to get people who don’t do resistance training to do resistance training?” he asks. A bit tangentially to the research he goes on “that’s a good question, so like why the hell does Peloton work?”

Ironically, enough Peloton had made a pitch to his company. They declined.

“I am assuming because...

Each day Dobri Dobrev, who lost most of his hearing in World War II, would walk 12 miles to the Cathedral of Alexander Nevsky in Sofia Bulgaria to collect money for charitable causes. He donated over 40,000 Euros to Bulgarian monasteries and churches and to utility bills for orphanages.

He died in Bulgaria in 2018 at the age of 103. Why am I telling you this? It would seem, at least to me, that Dobri Dobrev had a true understanding of can and cannot. His behavior was connected to such a strong value that he was motivated to do all that he could even as he surpassed the age of 100. When you say you “can’t” do something, keep this context in mind. I believe you have all the resources to do what you want. I also believe that “can’t” has been learned in the wrong context. I also believe things that have been learned can be unlearned and replaced with something new.

Learned Helplessness

In the late 1960’s, Martin Seligman conducted a study that...

The greatest Exercise program in of itself will not get you the dream body. No matter what anyone says, sells, preaches, push’s or peddles.

There is no secret contained within the exercise selection, set or rep scheme, tempo or volume. I guarantee it.

If you gave me 100 good exercise programs I would see 80-90% similarity in what they recommend and the foundations would all pretty much be the same other than manipulation of the variables mentioned above.

That’s because all the good programs I have followed and subsequently written adhere to a certain set of principles, that when applied consistently create the desired results.

So what’s the secret you ask?

If you haven’t noticed the secret already I just mentioned it.

Consistency.

That’s right. That’s the secret, the most obvious answer. Doing something repetitively will create the change you desire (as long as what your doing honors the principles and practices apparent in all good programming).

In college, I would take my roommate to the grocery store. I had a car, he didn’t. He would perform mental arithmetic to determine how much chicken he could get for the price of any item. He had the terrible habit of verbalizing his math as well.

For example, I would know that for the cost of a premade sandwich he could get 1.5 pounds of chicken. He was demonstrating what is called opportunity cost; the unrealized flow of utility from the alternatives a choice displaces. That is, if he spends 6.00 dollars on a sandwich that displaces the 1.5 pounds of chicken he could have purchased with that money.

Opportunity-cost means that when we make a decision between several choices, we give up the benefits of any alternative choice. Picture this, if I needed to consume 2000 calories in a day to lose one pound in a week, I could not achieve weight loss and still consume 2500 calories. Weight loss in this case cost me 500 calories. Meaning, I cannot eat that extra slice of pizza...

Before she was a professor at the Wharton School of Business with the University of Pennsylvania, Katherine Milkman was a graduate student at Harvard. She had gone to the gym frequently during her undergraduate career but now lacked the energy. In an interview with NPR she said at the end of the day she just wanted to “watch TV or read Harry Potter”. Milkman found a way to pair what she wanted to do (indulge in Harry Potter) with what she needed to do (exercise).

How can we take something we may be on the fence about and hop onto the side of action?

Let’s say that capability and a prompt were in place, but motivation wasn’t just there yet. Motivation is at 70% of what it needs to be. How do we add that extra 30%? We can make the outcome more attractive. One way to do this is to link something you want to do with something you know you should do. I have several podcasts that I love including “Up First” with NPR, “The...

In the context of health change efforts what is your first reaction to the truth of this statement: “If I fail then I am a failure”.

If you believe this statement is true you are attributing situational challenges to a stable characteristic. Just like shooting a free throw once does not make you a basketball player messing something up does not make you a failure. It’s how we conceptualize the meaning of our behaviors that matter.

Problems occur when this dysfunctional thinking begins to make it hard to find information that would contradict negative thinking patterns. We only focus on the negative and ignore the positive. From this, negative or maladaptive identities are born.

Notice when negative emotions come to the surface. Chose not to accept them as truth. Ask yourself, “what could be going through my mind right now that could be triggering or worsening how I’m feeling right now?”. Write down what you think the cause is.

For your negative...