My 'See-food Diet' Begins

The idea for this came to me a couple of weeks ago.  I was at a pub with a friend taking pictures of our martinis on my phone.  I like taking pictures of martinis because to me they look so pretty, like delicate flowers, but they don't last long.  Here are two of my favourites from the past.

So I am the loon who at the bar will take pictures of her martinis.  Oh but it's not just martinis.  Depending on where I am, I may take a shot of table setting, like this.

But I digress...

Anyway, as soon as I had taken pictures of my drinks that night, I instantly went to an app called "My Fitness Pal", entered in the calories for those drinks and that's when the idea of photo-documenting everything I eat occurred to me.

I find tracking what I eat helpful to keeping me healthy, but sometimes entering the details (especially on the small keyboard of my iPhone) can be cumbersome. I also am not fond of counting calories, as there are times I just end up making a guestimate on what I ate that day.  Thus, a photo journal of everything I eat seemed like a perfect idea.

And so here's my plan.  For the month of May I will...

1. Take a picture of everything I consume. (This will all be done primarily with my iPhone and I'm toying with the idea of using apps like Hipstamtic or Instagram to make it more interesting.)

2. Upload my daily consumption to Flickr nightly.

3. Every Monday record my progress here (what I noticed about my eating, if I lost any weight, how my perception of food and drink may have changed, etc).

What I expect will happen:

1. I will make healthier choices of food simply because I know that people might see it.

2. I will make more colourful choices of food, due to the photography, and my consumption choices will become more healthy as a result.

3. I will do more public writing, as I am recording my progress on here weekly.  (Maybe my creative literary juices will begin to flow again and who knows? Maybe some of it will end up being funny.)

4. I will have fun trying to think of different ways to depict the same food and drink.

5. I may lose followers because of my weekly food posts, but then again maybe I won't.  At the end of the day, I'm doing this to get me into a habit of healthy eating, not to win a popularity contest.

All this starts tomorrow, so we'll see how it goes.