Writing macro intake down

This is the question I’ve been asking myself lately. I do not think it’s obsessive in the least to simply monitor the calories and macronutrients you have in each meal.

My family, nutritionist, and pediatrician all say it is… Since the beginning of this summer I’ve been consistently writing down my intake, trying to maintain somewhere in the neighborhood of 3800 calories a day. It varies greatly on certain days, of course. It’s not that big of a deal. I just eat healthy foods, sticking to whole foods as opposed to “empty” foods like candy.

I’m all for achieving balance in life, but when it is viewed by the majority(my friends, family, and the practitioners I rely on) that playing video games for 3 hours a day is less obsessive than taking 10 minutes, once a day, at the end of the day, to write down my intake, what am I supposed to do? :stuck_out_tongue:

Heh, the irony.

Don’t mean to complain, though it probably came off that way. I’m just curious, do the majority of you write down your intake on a notepad, and try to maintain a certain caloric range? I know bodybuilders do this, generally, but how can that be viewed as obsessive?

I did this for the first month of my clean eating effort. But I found I was eating the same stuff over and over. I’m so good with the numbers now – I can do it in my head at the end of the day.

Breakfast:
1 cup strawberries
1 cup milk
1 cup oatmeal
1 cup (met. drive – aka Metabolic Drive).

400 calories

Lunch:
chicken breast
cottage cheese
pile o’ greens

300 calories

Snack:

yogurt
banana
nuts

300 calories

Dinner:
Salmon
Veggies
nuts
fruit

400 cals

Protein shake for snack
300 cals
etc…

BTW – I’m trying to drop a lot of fat – so 2000 cals on off days, 2400 on training days.

[quote]Dedicated_1 wrote:
This is the question I’ve been asking myself lately. I do not think it’s obsessive in the least to simply monitor the calories and macronutrients you have in each meal.

My family, nutritionist, and pediatrician all say it is… Since the beginning of this summer I’ve been consistently writing down my intake, trying to maintain somewhere in the neighborhood of 3800 calories a day. It varies greatly on certain days, of course. It’s not that big of a deal. I just eat healthy foods, sticking to whole foods as opposed to “empty” foods like candy.

I’m all for achieving balance in life, but when it is viewed by the majority(my friends, family, and the practitioners I rely on) that playing video games for 3 hours a day is less obsessive than taking 10 minutes, once a day, at the end of the day, to write down my intake, what am I supposed to do? :stuck_out_tongue:

Heh, the irony.

Don’t mean to complain, though it probably came off that way. I’m just curious, do the majority of you write down your intake on a notepad, and try to maintain a certain caloric range? I know bodybuilders do this, generally, but how can that be viewed as obsessive?[/quote]

Ask them if they’d undertake a research project or experiment without keeping a detailed lab notebook. Try getting a patent or submitting an article to a peer-reviewed journal without one.

In your case, your body composition is your project - you’re just using the scientific method to get results.

Those people are trained to fix problems, and a lot of people with eating disorders write everything down, so it’s probably a huge warning sign with the people they work with.