You can download a PDF of this chart at www.rhlink.com.
Pescetarian Tracker
Besides keeping you accountable (it’s hard to “forget” that second giant chocolate chip cookie when it’s staring at you in black and white in the “Food and Drink” column), this tracker serves another crucial function: identifying overeating triggers. It also shows you what you’re doing right.
You’ll notice that some days, things go well: You eat appropriate amounts of food—better yet, healthy foods—you work out, and you’re full of energy. Other days may be just the opposite—you feel sluggish, you overeat (possibly binge), the food isn’t very nutritious, and exercise never happens. And then there are the in-between days.
By filling out the “Time of Day,” “Sleep,” “Hunger,” “Food and Drink,” “Exercise,” and “Situation/emotions” columns on your Pescetarian Tracker, you’ll discover a wealth of information about what triggers those good, bad, or so-so days. Here are connections to look for:
Sleep. Both quality (disrupted vs. solid sleep) and quantity (number of hours) impact energy, appetite, and mood. Scan your Tracker for sleep connections. For instance, you might find that one night of skimping on Zs doesn’t affect you much, but two nights in a row leave you lethargic, hungry, and sedentary.
Hunger. This one’s usually obvious: Let yourself get too hungry and you overeat. The hunger scale, written at the bottom of your Tracker, goes like this:
| 1 | = | Ravenous |
| 2 | = | A little hungry |
| 3 | = | Neither hungry nor full |
| 4 | = | A little full |
| 5 | = | Ugh! Too full. |
Note your hunger level both before and after eating. So, you’d write in “1/5” if you went into a meal at “1” and got up from the meal a “5.” Your goal: start eating at a “2” and leave the table at a “3” or “4.”
Time of Day. How often do you eat? If you wait too long in between meals, you’re going to see a lot of “1s” in your hunger scale column. If your meals are reasonably sized (something you’re working toward in The Pescetarian Plan) hunger should kick in three to four hours after eating. When you’re at a “2” have a meal or a snack. See Appendix C for snack suggestions.
Food and Drink. Use this information to:
1. Identify unhealthy foods. Eating too many sweets, fried foods, soda, and the like? Take note of them, and decide which ones you want to tackle first. chapters 5 and 6 are your guides. If you’re eating too many sweets and other treats, start limiting these foods (see here for your daily treat calorie max). If your meals contain fried foods, meat, white bread, and the like, you might work on cleaning up one food group at a time. For instance, you could start with protein and shift away from meat to fish.
2. Identify healthy foods. Eating fruits, vegetables, whole grains, fish, nuts, and other healthy foods? Give yourself a pat on the back, and vow to keep it up. Circle the meals and snacks you enjoyed, and make them again (and again).
3. Find out how your meals affect hunger, exercise, and even sleep. For instance, some meals are very satiating, meaning they keep you feeling full longer, for the calories. Others leave you hungry an hour later. Other meals sap energy—you might find they put the brakes on exercise even hours after eating them. Also, certain acidic or spicy foods or caffeinated beverages may make it harder to get to sleep, or may disrupt sleep.
Exercise. Tally up your weekly minutes of aerobic exercise. (Even if you fill out this log for just four days, record exercise minutes for seven days.) If it’s not even close to the recommended 150 minutes (explained in Chapter 9), don’t be discouraged. We’ll get you there! You can also track steps, using a pedometer. Ideally you’d hit 10,000 steps daily. Not there yet? Add 1,000 steps per day—hold that level for two weeks—then increase by another 1,000 steps per day for another two weeks, and so forth.
Also note any ripple effects of exercise—do you tend to eat more nutritiously after workout sessions? Sleep better?
Situations/emotions. Stress, loneliness, even exuberance can trigger overeating. Look for connections like heading to the vending machine after a tense encounter with your boss, or tearing into the bag of cookies at the end of a stressful day. Time of day can also be a trigger. For example, if you habitually have a coffee and doughnut at 10:30 A.M., that’s just what you’re going to crave at that hour. We all do a little emotional eating, but when it crosses the line, it’ll be next to impossible to lose weight and keep it off. If you feel out of control around food, turn to Chapter 9 for some useful tips.
Food Groups. The “Grain/Starchy Vegetables,” “Fruit” and other foods groups at the bottom of the chart help you quickly assess how closely you’re adhering to the Pescetarian Plan. As I explained in chapters 5 and 6, it takes a little studying up, but soon you’ll know just what a portion of cereal, milk (or soy milk), fish, or other foods looks like. From your Food and Drink column, figure out how many portions of each food group you had. For instance, you had an egg? Write down “1” next to Protein. Later that day, you had a 4-ounce piece of salmon? Add “+4.” If that’s all the protein servings you had, then your total is “5.” Do this for all the other food groups.
The exception is “Treats.” Instead of food groups, you count up treat calories, which you can usually find on the back of the chocolate bar, box of cookies, or other packaged items. If there is no food label, use your best guess.