Getting Started

My idea for this blog is that it's going to be a daily photo food diary -- I'll take a picture of everything I eat, and that will let me keep a nice realistic record of what I'm really consuming, instead of fuzzy estimates, which studies show tend to underestimate actual consumption. I'll put up a description, and I'll also try to come up with reliable estimates of the protein and carbs contained in the food.

Why protein and carbs? Why not fat? Why not calories? Because I'm not trying to keep track of either, especially. I'm pre-diabetic (and at some point I'll discuss exactly what that means, and why I think it's a little misleading), recently diagnosed, and I've had a long history (going back into my very early teens, and I'm in my late 30s now) of hypoglycemia. At some future point I'll get into how those add up to a cohesive picture, but for now, suffice it to say that I don't handle carbohydrates at all well, and that it doesn't really matter if they're simple carbs or complex ones. So I try to limit them, in both single-meal consumption and total daily consumption, and I'm going to track how I do at that. I'm also tracking protein, because if you're limiting carbs, your body needs to produce glucose to run on by making it in the liver out of protein, and it can get that protein one of two places: it can take it from your diet, if you eat enough, or it can mine it from your muscles, if you don't. The latter is not a desirable outcome, so I want to be sure I'm keeping my protein up high enough to prevent that, so I need to keep track of protein as well.

What about fat? I don't really care. There's no credible evidence that dietary fat causes any bad outcomes, or that it actually does any of the scary things attributed to it, like raising cholesterol; in fact, there's substantial evidence, and more continuing to accumulate, that limiting dietary fat causes those things -- or rather that raising carbohydrates does, and if you hold protein constant and limit fat, you're compelled to raise carbs. If you don't believe this, or want to understand what the studies really show, go get yourself a copy of Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories -- it's an entertaining read, as well as being incredibly enlightening.

Okay, so what about calories? I don't care much about those either, at least at this point. I'm doing low-carb to keep from sliding into full-blown diabetes, with all its attendant complications. I've got some weight to lose, but getting control of my blood sugar is my major concern right now. Anyway, limiting calories on a low-carb diet isn't hard to do if you don't go face down in the cheese (such a marked contrast to a low-fat diet!), and my weight's been falling of its own accord without my tracking calories, so I'm going to let them take care of themselves until and unless I stall out. With a photographic record, I can always go back and figure calories later if I decide I need to, but for now, it's one more thing to mess with and I'm not gonna.

So that's what you'll be seeing: food pics, carbs, and protein. Oh, and I might as well apologize for the quality of the pics in advance. I need to use a camera I can count on having with me, and one where it's easy to upload the photos, which means I'm taking them with my iPhone. The purpose of the photos is data, not aesthetics, although I'll try to keep them outside the realm of the downright painful.