Tracking your diet - boring but essential

Welcome to HyperFocus Health, my weekly newsletter where I reveal the best of health and human performance for people with ADHD.

This isn’t for the rest of your life - it’s a period of time to reflect and re-calibrate.

Creating awareness around your diet and how it’s affecting you is an essential step at different stages of life.

When you’re young, you can eat just about whatever you want and not worry about it.

As you stride into your late 20s and early 30s, the diet and activity levels start to show itself more.

Mid-30s and beyond? Well, you can easily tell who’s focused on their diet and fitness and who hasn’t. This gets more obvious with every passing year.

And unfortunately, we may not be able to completely blame age for our slowing metabolism… Turns out, our metabolism is more stable than we once thought throughout adulthood (ages 20-60).

So why do people fall apart during this phase of life? Well, they tend to focus more on work, family, and other priorities. Fitness habits slide and nearly all of the convenient food choices we’re surrounded by in America are just awful, so our diet begins to suffer, too.

Muscle requires energy to maintain, increasing our resting metabolic rate (RMR).

As we shift our energy toward these other areas of life, our muscle mass begins to shrink, and our metabolism right along with it.

So, it’s less a matter of age and more “use it or lose it”.

The diet still matters, though, and during this shift in life, we lose track of what we’re putting into our body.

Enter diet tracking… The practice of recording everything you eat for a specific period of time.

Benefits of diet tracking:

1. People who track their diet lose more weight

2. It ensures you’re getting enough protein (which is essential to preserving the muscle you already have and building new muscle)

3. You can clearly see trends with junk food or alcohol intake (evening snacking, stress drinking, etc.)

4. The veil is pulled back on just how terrible fast food is for us…

It’s not easy to get going but I promise, commit to 2 full weeks of tracking every single piece of food you eat and watch what happens.

I’ve used all kinds of approaches to track my diet over the years. Recently, apps have dramatically improved, making this process much less painful than it’s ever been.

Personally, I love MacroFactor. It’s the best nutrition app I’ve ever seen.

(I have no relationship with them, just genuinely love the product)

We do hard things. Keep going.

- Geoff