I mentioned yesterday that I was trying a new thing. I was a little loosey-goosey with it yesterday, so today I decided I’d actually take the next logical step and track my calories in a budget.
There are a few things to point out in there:
- That Limit field – this is my calorie target for the day
- Remaining – this is the “left over” calories after totaling what I’ve eaten today
- Balance – this is how I’ve done balancing plants against the rest of my diet
- Fruits get a “+” beside them – this is the “credit” idea from the original post
- The bread, meat, cheese, etc stuff in there gets a “-” – this is the “debit” idea
- Some stuff has an “n” beside it – these are foods that I’m taking out of my credit-debit balance. They still count against my limit, but they don’t count as positive or negative on the “balance” line. There are different reasons for each entry – I mentioned nuts in the original post, while smoothies and soup are pretty close to calorie-balanced by dint of their ingredients.
I don’t know if this helps you, but it really helps me. I’m an obsessive budgeter when it comes to finances, so seeing my food lined up this way is natural for me. Today it was really powerful to see that although I “cheated” – the cookie and hard bread were not supposed to be there! – I could still have a reasonably balanced day and keep my calories where I want them to be.
There are a lot of things to talk about here, but I’ll save those for other posts. For now, I’m kind of pleased to see how well this works for me.
