food log challenge

I've never logged what I eat.

For a while last year, when I first started weaning meat out of my diet, I kept track of how much protein I was getting, mostly to make sure I wouldn't waste away into nothingness.  At some point, I hit up my friend Heather for some food advice because I was feeling wonky, and she told me that I wasn't taking in enough calories to support the booty.  So I started roughly keeping a mental tally of calories, which was actually a really eye-opening experience because I had no idea how many calories were in most things (vodka has calories? how rude).  Still, I didn't do a formal tally, just a rough estimate throughout the day to make sure I was getting in enough and the right kind of delicious calories.

Fast forward a year.  As the distances get longer, nutrition becomes more and more important, both during exercise and after in recovery.  When I was in my last 70.3 training cycle, I was pretty careful most of the time (notice the absence of absolutes here) about what went in.  I spent the first few weeks of November solidly in my off-season diet wearing my off-season pants, but I only really enjoy that for a short time before I start craving veggies again.  

Last night my coach emailed us all with a challenge - log everything we eat between now and Christmas Eve, and send it to her every single day.  Yikes.

I did a pretty thorough cost:benefit analysis of the situation, and while it seems that horrifying someone I've just started working with is not really the most brilliant idea I've ever had, I've decided to do it because I think it will be really good for me.  And to make it even worse, I'm going to post it all here when it's over.  Nothing like telling the internet you'll do something to create a false sense of accountability.  I actually do think it's a great idea for the reasons she sent us - it's tough to keep your eating on track this time of year, and maybe I can figure out some things that I need more of in my diet (ice cream?) to help grow the Ironman monster.

So, starting today, I'm going to write down every single thing that goes in my mouth and in 2 weeks you'll get to see the list of it all.  I am NOT going to take pictures of it all because I think that's annoying, but I might document some of it.  We'll see.

Feel free to join me, although you don't win anything except the joy of putting your own diet under the microscope (neener neener neener).  Maybe it will be fun?

Have you ever kept any kind of food log?  How did that go?