Food
There are often features on the news talking about our diet, so I decided to investigate exactly what mine consists of. Starting on the 1st of April 2004 (not as an April Fool’s joke) I started keeping a tally of everything I ate. I have to admit that I sometimes forgot to write in what I was eating and so these results cannot be taken as entirely accurate. However, I kept on recording all the way through to the 24th of July 2004 so the erroneous entries become more apparent.
Results
I have published the results for each month as a table in each of these web pages
Evaluation
From the results we can see that I have a hot chocolate and some breakfast cereal quite regularly. This is because eating cereal when I wake up and then having a hot drink wakes me up and keeps me warm until lunchtime. I have about two cooked meals per day, although sometimes I will have one or three depending on whether I feel hot or cold, respectively.
I eat a LOT of snacks and this is increasing! From about three snack items per day in April, I was eating more like five or six per day during July. This was higher during June and might be seriously unhealthy.
Conclusions
My morning habit of eating breakfast and having a hot drink is good and probably should not be changed.
- My habit of eating about two hot meals per day is good and probably does not need to be changed, except for adding a third meal during winter.
- My habit of snacking is very high and might be unhealthy. If the opportunity arises, I should ask an expert and present this data to them.
- The food I eat for breakfast changes every couple of months and occasionally I choose a sugared cereal. Keeping to less sugary choices might be better.
- The food I eat for cooked meals is often very bad. Microwaved burgers and chips are not part of a healthy lifestyle, so finding healtheir alternatives to could be of serious benefit.
Overall my eating habits are much like those of any kid. However, the way my body operates is likely to change as I get older and make it less ressiliant to the junk I fill it with. Making healtheir choices now will prepare me for this but I will need to get expert(s) advice.
Review (2005-03-18)
Three quarters of a year on and has anything changed? Well, since I am now allowed on the computer regularly I am snacking less because I am not holed up in my bedroom all the time. After seeing the results of the experiment, by the middle of August I had completely eliminated microwaved foods from my diet. I really do not miss them and I only have fast food about once a month, if that.
The breakfast section of my diet remains the same and the reasons have not changed. Something which I had not recorded in the original experiment was what I ate with the main dish, such as chips or vegetables. Back then I recall it was mainly chips but now it is mainly vegetables (albeit from frozen) so this is another improvement. There is hardly any fruit in my diet due to me still having braces on my teeth but once they are removed I shall attempt to eat an apple per day, probably as a dessert.