I realized I was over eating. And decided to count calories for a month and see the results. Using this process I established a baseline for my calorie consumption and got some simple statistics of how my calorie intake changed day to day. A year from this baseline experiment I will recollect this data and repeat this experiment and once again get some statistics for comparison. You can read about my second attempt in my next article. For now come and read on and find out what I’ve learned and how I’ve identified the problems with my diet.
A Note about Data Collection
A few points of note before I take a deep dive into this subject. I collected data on the number of calories in the meals I consumed and the date I ate the meal along with the name of the actual meal. This data was collected between September 20th, 2020 and October 15th, 2020. The second time around, a year from this date I will redo this experiment and evaluate how my diet has changed. This time around however, I was not very diligent on how I collected the data. So reader beware!
There were problems with my data collection process which means that you can only really take things as approximate numbers. Approximate calorie counts were basically calculated as follows:
- Looking at the packaging if it was pre-packaged piece of food.
- Asking the restaurant (or looking at the menu) to find out how many calories were in the food I ordered
- Looking up the food on the internet and approximating the percentage of what items were in the food and adding this up.
I should have measured my total body weight as well and the food weight and maybe a few other parameters. I will do this in my second future experiment a year from now.
Note that the data was also somewhat fuzzified after analysis – for instance when dividing the food up into food groups, there wasn’t enough information about the original food to do this effectively. And in the end there was a difference in the total number of calories between the actual real total and the subsequent re-categorizations.
My Month of Observations
Unfortunately, I came to realize, in this first baseline month of data collection, that I was not a very healthy eater. My average weight at the beginning of this time period was around 68 Kg. This is a little high and I was somewhat plump. Of course I didn’t really record my weight so I’m not sure that this was actually my weight.
The recommended number of daily calories proposed by the USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) [1] is shown in the table below for people of various ages and levels of activity. According to this table, I should have been eating roughly between 2200 to 2600 calories daily as a man.
In reality, I was, however, eating considerably less most days. On average my daily calorie intake was at around 1550 Calories. This amount of food didn’t really seem to make any change in my total weight as I recall. Of course, I wasn’t really measuring so not completely sure. But what I do clearly remember is that I was satiated with the quantity of food I was eating.
The graph above demonstrates my calorie intake on a daily basis for the entire month. My month though was a few days short. The green line shows a moving average. And using this moving average and the original data in blue, the variation in my calorie intake was about 1550 +/- 500 calories per day.
As I said, that I was not eating healthy at all. In fact, I did a rough approximation of how my calories were distributed across food group as shown below.
Its a complete disaster, as you can see. I ate a total of 37,189 calories over the course of about a month. In the graph above there are some discrepancies after I divided the food into food groups (i.e. the total number of calories adds to a lower number of 33,434 Calories – this is likely just because of some poor accounting on my part). Regardless of the discrepancies however, it does give some rough baseline of how my diet was divided up among food groups. We can look at this from the perspective of the percentage of total calories from each food group over the month. See below:
The shocking thing is that about 21% of my total calorie intake for the month was coming from desserts – mostly chocolate. Edit: Of course, within the sweets category (i.e. Chocolate Bars, Cookies, Cakes), there are some things that were healthier than others, some people brought this up and so I’ve added an additional graph below breaking down the calories in these sweets. Kind bars are my number one source of calories here.
These are typically mostly made from nuts and so the calories provided are not necessarily from refined sugars. However, the next largest calorie sources are Kitkat bars and Snickers which doesn’t really bode well. Below is a picture of a kind bar.
Following closely behind was Poultry and Beef (roughly 19%). Combined however a bulk of my calories actually came from Meat dishes (roughly 27%). Distant seconds were Breads (roughly 12%), Eggs & Dairy (roughly 10%), Rice (roughly 9.5%).
In reality, I was actually eating a lot more sugar than is represented by the graph above. For instance, in the dairy category, I would eat mango yogurt. As you can see from the picture below. This stuff is sweet. Disclaimer: The images below were taken in 2021 and added to this article.
I would also eat a lot of Egg and Tuna sandwiches. In total I had about 24 sandwiches from 711. The problem with these sandwiches is that they actually also contain a fair amount of sugar. Most likely added to encourage people to become more addicted to them. See picture below. Disclaimer: These pictures were taken in 2021 and added to this article.
In fact, I ended up eating a lot of convenience store food. Even things like Sugar Cane Duck (a pre-packaged meat). Also similar to the packaged goods above.
I also had a lot of fried foods. For instance, fried chicken, french fries, potato chips, fried croquette and the like. So most likely in addition to sugar there was a lot of refined oils in the food. A bulk of my food was highly processed.
Future Goals
There are a lot of problems eating sugary foods and generally highly processed foods. I’ll discuss some of these issues in the future at some point. But for now here are my goals. I want to start eating healthier. And you should too. Not only does much of the pre-packaged food contain added sugar, but produces a lot of waste.
I would like to switch to eating more fresh fruit and increasing vegetables in my diet significantly. Soft drinks and sweet drinks need to be decreased. And much more significantly I need to stop eating chocolates and cakes. These are having a disproportionate effect on my diet.
Check out the my future article on how successful I was at making dietary changes. Until then folks. Happy eating. You can download the data I collected over the month below.
Download the Data
I’ve put the raw data and analysis into an libre office spreadsheet. Click on the links below to access this data and related images as a ZIP.
With that folks. Thanks. And please feel free to leave a comment and share your experiences with food and calories.
References
- USDA Food and Nutrition Service, Department of Agriculture. Estimated Calorie Needs per Day by Age, Gender, and Physical Activity Level. 2011. https://www.fns.usda.gov/estimated-calorie-needs-day-age-gender-and-physical-activity-level.