In a meeting a few years ago, one of the members asked me if I still kept a food journal. When I replied affirmatively, she couldn’t believe it. “Well there is NO WAY I’m going to do that,” she said, while rolling her eyes, “its just way too obsessive and weird to be writing everything down like that.”

Her clear and firm message was “I’m coming to a couple of meetings to get the gist of this thing, I’m going to lose some weight, and then I’m outta here.” She did, indeed, come several more times, and she lost weight, too. In every discussion, however, she brought up the fact that she was going back to being a “normal” person ASAP. For all I know, she succeeded, because after a month or two I never saw her again.

I admired her for the conviction of her beliefs and I applauded the empowered feeling she had about wanting to be a “normal” person. When I think back to my life before 2002, I have a very clear memory that I, too, held a dim view of people who either weighed their food, wrote down what they ate, or planned “low-cal” menus.

Along the way to losing 50+ pounds, however, I discovered that all three of those things (tracking, weighing, planning) were not only useful in the weight reduction phase, they were also easy to incorporate into my daily routine. In fact, once I began keeping a food log I acutally felt BETTER about myself, because I was no longer in denial and I didn’t have to feel ashamed. Because it was those very feelings of shame that led me to the gallon of ice cream, the entire pizza, the whole box of cookies, or whatever, that I used to eat.

And so I embrace the “abnormality” of “obsessing” over a daily tracking of what I eat and drink. For most of the past five years I’ve had no problem keeping it up, and only in the times when I was throwing caution to the wind and NOT tracking did I ever feel unhappy or out of control.

I think this works for me because (a) I do have a somewhat obsessive nature and (b) I really like writing. And I think it makes sense that anyone who doesn’t share my “a” and my “b” probably thinks food journalling is a huge, cumbersome, and unecessary burden. (Which is why WeightWatchers came out with their “Core” plan).

At any rate, I share my interest in/desire for tracking food because it’s a part of what works for ME, not because I believe it’s a universal cure-all. I know many, many successful weight loss experts who just keep a subconscious awareness of what they’re doing.

For a long time I’ve struggled about what to do with Unexpected Eating Extravaganzas. Write it down? Forget about it? Tear up the journal and start over next week? Clearly there are occasions (parties, restaurant meals, family gatherings) where there is absolutely no way to be clear about what was served and eaten.

My current approach is just to write in the UEE name (i.e. “Christmas dinner at Sue’s house”) and either putting in an approximate total number, or simply assigning a randomly large one. That way there is at least a place holder in the journal. I don’t need to sit down with a calculator and a pen and pencil trying to parse everything out.

But for me, it helps to see that UEE in there. After all “Deli, New York City” is part of the reason I’m working off these four extra pounds. As long as I know where they came from, I know what to do next.

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P.S. Devin and I are flying to Ithaca, NY this weekend to see my niece in her high school musical. Our hotel claims to have wi-fi. We shall see!