I tracked my eating habits during my meals over the course of three consecutive days (i.e. 9th through 11th) with particular attention to if I ate too fast, which I loosely defined as whenever my chewing rate was noticeably high. I focused on how I tend to consume food rather than beverages because I don’t personally think I have an issue with drinking beverages too fast. Eating too fast negatively impacts my gut, so it is valuable to me to hopefully change that unhealthy habit.
My interval of tracking matched my mealtimes, which was lunch around or after noon and dinner around or after 6PM each day. Each meal I logged what I was doing and thinking before and while eating. Here is an example log from Friday, January 9th at 12:15PM: “watched mukbang videos beforehand, woke up at 9:30AM and have been hungry, waiting on girlfriend, chili is delicious, easy to scoop, not too hot, with another person”.
A takeaway is that unlike the first self-tracking experience, my behavior didn’t significantly change from knowing that I am tracking my eating, which I interpret as knowing that my eating habits would be revealed to others wasn’t a strong enough disincentive to alter my behavior. This is probably because I don’t find it taboo to share that I eat too fast and the potential reasons why I eat too fast. I also realized that my mealtimes weren’t as inconsistent as I thought they’d be over the weekend. During the weekdays I consistently eat lunch at noon and dinner at 6PM, and the largest time difference in my logged meals was 1.5 hours. I’m glad I didn’t skip any meals.
Next time around, I might structure my logs more to standardize my entries and make tracking easier. For instance, having preset categories like mood, hunger level, pre-meal activity, post-meal activity, alone or not, etc. In this way, consistently tracking these additional factors might reveal to me patterns that might have systematic origins. While tracking, I had a general idea of the connections I could form between causes, but with this improved logging, I could form connections easier in the end by viewing the categories rather than picking from the unstructured notes.
Models on my eating habit ecosystem:
