alt Hacker NewsDepends what your goal is. My suggestion is if your goal is weight loss, don't think about calorie tracking at all.
Count your servings of whole vegetables/fruit. Try to MAXIMIZE these. Yes, maximize in order to lose weight.
It's far easier to track just this small subset of food. If you are maximizing these items, you'll naturally start feeling full and eat less sweets. Try to do this slowly over time, changing your diet dramatically overnight will cause you to hate the process and give up.
Change your diet less than 10% per week, keep eating all of your favorite guilty pleasure foods, just incorporate more healthy foods you enjoy as well, ideally before you eat the less healthy items to give yourself time to start feeling full from them. Slowly find more dishes heavy in vegetables that you like. Try to eat them more often. If you're cooking for yourself or serving yourself, try to increase the ratio of vegetable to other items.
Getting pizza? Maybe do a side salad first or a get a veggie pizza. Don't try to cut the pizza entirely until you're further along in your journey.
Don't stress about it. If you're consistently finding ways to make small changes like this you'll start heading in the right direction over the long haul and your pallet will adapt to enjoy the foods you're not used to slowly.
Replies
Maximize might be a little overkill. The government recommends 5-9 servings of fruit and vegetables a day and I found that getting to that range involves putting so many vegetables in every meal that you feel full naturally.
Have you actually tried this?
You are onto something. If you maximise fruit and veg then you are also maximising phytochemicals, and that means having a nice skin tone.
I really like this aspect, the inside-out skin care, and I now see little point in eating something such as a huge bowl of pasta or rice because of a lack of phytochemicals. I need green veggies, orange ones, red ones and the phytochemicals that make them so.
I think that 'nutrition experiments' are what you need, so, as you say, small changes. This means discontinuing things as well as adopting new things. With an 'experiment' in can be for a month. I quit processed foods, dairy and much else in this way, to note the improvements to things like oral health, joint pain, digestion and so on.
You are right about changing the palate, it actually takes about ten days for the taste buds to be replaced.