Regular readers of this blog may remember that I track my food intake through an app called MyFitnessPal. It was referred to me by my therapist and it works very well. The database of foods is expansive, it lets you enter recipes or regular meals as you wish, it gives full nutritional information for everything, and it’s free. It’s been great.

This morning, as I entered my breakfast, I was met with a small notification.

“[I have] logged in for 365 days in a row!”

I’ve been doing this a solid year. My mind boggles at that.

For the past twelve months, I’ve done my best to record every single thing that I’ve consumed, food or drink, and I have a record of it to look back on.

To be fair, there are some things that I don’r record. If a soda has zero calories, I won’t record it, and certain meals – the trip to the churrascaria back in January, for instance – that just couldn’t possibly be recorded. (A churrascaria is a Brazilian steakhouse, where the waitstaff bring unlimited amounts of over a dozen types of meat to your table for you to choose from. There’s beef, there’s pork, there’s chicken, there’s lamb, there’s sausage, plus side dishes, and there’s just no way to accurately estimate how much of what you’re getting. The portions that you receive of most meats is very small, in order to allow you to try more varieties of them, and trying to log it is just too much of a headache to be worth it.) So there are cheat days. Once or twice I didn’t actually log a thing, although I logged into the app. But the vast majority of my foods are recorded and accurately so.

When I started this a year ago I thought it was a great tool to show me how much I was consuming. I didn’t try to adjust my diet any, I just wanted to see how many calories I was eating a day and then after a period of time adjust my diet to compensate, in order to lose weight. I haven’t really adjusted my diet that much – as I write this, I’m eating a bowlful of leftover chicken fried rice – but I’ve still managed to lose 14 pounds since starting this journey. Considering that I haven’t really done anything to try to lose weight, I’m happy with what I’ve accomplished.

So now the focus is going to be on watching how much I eat. I tend to overeat on a lot of occasions and that’s the main reason I go over a day’s allotment of calories. (Once again, see the churrascaria, a place that it is VERY easy to overeat.) Portion control needs to become a thing. Then we’ll worry about pulling my diet away from comfort foods and into something a little more healthy – with the occasional cheat day, of course, still being logged.

I’m really proud of sticking with this for a whole year. I never thought I’d be doing it for that long. I’m looking forward to what the next year will bring.