It's been a loooong time since I posted to this blog, but I'd made a promise to myself to keep the "fun stuff" to an absolute minimum until I felt comfortable about my dissertation progress. I have to admit that I'm still not feel great about my progress...
But the opportunity to use this blog in a way that might help with classwork is too big to waste.
To those of you from HBHE 600, welcome! It looks like I coerced some of you to jump onto my blog. Last Thursday, Jose gave you "homework" that amounts to developing a behavior modification plan. I thought I'd share my own!
My goal is to eat better. Somewhere in my late 20s, my weight became completely contingent upon what I was stuffing into my mouth. I'm sure many of you can relate to my prior weight management strategies: eat whatever, and exercise as much as you need to avoid accumulating too much chub. Admittedly, it wasn't a perfect strategy - my waistline slowly but relentlessly increased until some new equilibrium established itself at age 25. I attributed it to laziness rather than gluttony, though. But now, I can run for hours and it doesn't do a lot for me! I don't know if it's because my metabolism changed or because running more made me eat more. What I do know, though, is that if I want to stay healthy, I needed to devote more attention to what I'm chewing on.
I'm a pretty religious "tracker." I think a lot of us in graduate school are secretly fastidious about using Moleskins or charts to see how we're spending money, exercising, how productively we're writing, etc. My suggestion for those of you who are new to monitoring yourselves is to start with some sort of template, but modify and simplify until you get to something that works for you. It's easy for a tracker to spiral out of control, and it's important that you have a system that you can keep pace with. After many iterations, here's what I use myself:
I realize this is pretty difficult to read; and there's more than just eating on this. Let me point out some process points that work for me, and then some very apparent trends about my behavior:
- For simplicity's sake, I just grade my diet on an A-F scale. I used to try to track the number of servings I ate, the number of calories, number of snacks... and never kept pace. Now, I just look at what happened and assign a gist grade. I think it's a fair assessment. It's a little depressing that I didn't do any "A-grade" eating over the last week.
- I eat the same stuff every day. English muffins and soup every day of the working week? I don't like to spend time preparing food, so I eat whatever's handy, including what I stock at my desk.
- I apparently like cheese and crackers more than I ever imagined.
- My fruit intake is actually pretty good! There's work to be done on increasing veggies and reducing sodium and carbs, but I'm ok with the meals for now.
- There's a lot of snacking going on. It's not reflected well on the sheet just how many snacks I put down, but it's a lot.
So with all that said and analyzed, let me set a revised, short-term goal: improve snacking. It sounds like a loosy-goosy goal, but let's be reasonable. Rather than cutting out snacks, let's aim for making them healthier. Later, we can cut them out. And now knowing that I'm an "eat-what's handy" kind of guy, this probably won't be too hard. Buy more healthy snacks (carrot bites, raisins) and stop buying cheese and crackers or making biscotti.
I realize that something like recording the "duration of my behavior" isn't explicit in my tracker; nor are perceptions and feelings. Don't omit them yourselves. I've learned to adjust for the former when I assign myself a grade; and the latter figures both into my "sleep" column (through experience, I've noticed a huge correlation between the number of hours I'm sleeping each night and my diet) and in my "notes" column.
It'll be interesting to see how this pans out. I've been bad in the past in adhering to my modified diets, but there's quite a bit more at stake now that I have a little man who's 8 months old. In the long run, he's counting on me to 'be there.' More immediately, he seems to mimic whatever I do (and eat!), and I'm in the process of getting life insurance; so there are large and immediate financial implications to eating well (may be too late to alter my immediate rating, but there are still big incentives to drop some weight).
I'll blog more going forward to keep those of you who are interested in the loop about how I'm doing on my goals. More relevantly, I'll try to discuss this in the context of the health behavior theories we're addressing in class, so check back in from time to time.
Good luck to y'all on your own goals!
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