Here's what I learned after 31 days of being that obnoxious person who whips out her phone at the dinner table.
I figured out how to waste much less food.
The guilt I feel when I have to throw away food that has gone bad is immense. I compost when possible, and I've made my fair share of banana bread from rotten bananas, but there are still days when food ends up in the trash. And it's not just me: The average American household wastes $640 each year by throwing away uneaten food.
But I have finally achieved the elusive fridge equilibrium, when it's stocked with just enough food to last until the next trip to the supermarket. All it took was creating a visual catalog of my diet.
Scrolling through a month's worth of pictures made it clear how much, and what, I was eating. For example, one perishable that I can never seem to buy the right amount of is apples. With my very scientific data (blurry iPhone photos), I discovered that I ate 14 apples last month. Thanks to a little bit of math, I know now that I should buy seven apples on my biweekly trip to the grocery. It's not a perfect strategy since it's impossible for this month to be exactly like the last, but it's already made my trips to the grocery store faster and less stressful. (Try these savory apple recipes to make apples more exciting.)
Photograph by April Rueb
I identified my trigger.
Creating a visual catalog of my diet also brought with it a painful realization: I am addicted to guacamole. I've long rationalized my obsession by focusing on the healthy fat in avocados, and ignoring the half bag of tortilla chips that I inevitably consume when guac is in sight. But halfway through this experiment, I realized I was photographing every 16-ounce container of guacamole I bought just twice before it was empty. No matter how hard I tried, I wasn't able to cut down on my portion size.
When I asked our food editor what a serving size of guacamole technically is, she told me 2 ounces. That's right: I've been eating four times the recommended serving size of guac! Let's not even discuss the chips. (Here's what serving sizes of common foods look like.)
It hasn't been easy, but I've recently placed a moratorium on guacamole in my home. That might sound extreme, especially since guac can be part of a healthy diet, but this experiment made me accept that it is my trigger food. For now, I'll focus on learning how to eat it in moderation when I'm out at a restaurant or at a party with friends (that's a not-so-subtle hint for everyone I know to please serve guac at their upcoming functions).
I learned that I need to start saying "no" more.
When I look at all the photos I took during the month, I'm most frequently struck by the why-the-heck-did-I-eat-that feeling when I see food I didn't pay for. I don't like cake, but when cake was served at a recent bridal shower I attended, I ate it. A free cookie that my coworker already warned me tasted like chalk? I ate it (technically, I ate two).
I often think about how great my diet would be: if I always had the time and energy to prepare meals in advance, if I had the skills to cook anything, if food wasn't such an integral part of our society and available literally everywhere you look. But that's not the world we live in, and free food is something I need to learn to just say no to.
I figured out where all my money went.
The quickest way to feel guilty about spending $11 on a salad for lunch is to document it day after day. After seeing more and more of the same expensive containers of lettuce in my camera roll, I admitted to myself that I was being lazy and started packing my own lunch.
Maybe it was because I knew I'd be photographing these homemade salads, or maybe it was because I've spent too much time on Pinterest, but I made my very first mason jar salad during this experiment. I finally understand why they're so popular! They're easy to make, easy to transport, and super-delicious. Yes, I've joined the mason jar cult.
Photograph by April Rueb
The number on the scale surprised me.
I know what you're waiting for: Did keeping a visual food diary help me lose weight? Although I prefer to gauge my weight based on how well my clothes fit, I did step on an actual scale for the sake of this experiment. In 31 days, I lost 4 pounds.
I was already at a healthy weight when I began photographing my food, and I wasn't trying to lose weight, but I can understand how it happened. Searching for my phone, opening up the camera app, and taking a picture rarely took more than 10 seconds, but it was enough time to make me stop and think: Why am I eating this?
Sometimes the answer was, I don't know. Or that it was free. Or that it was time to eat. Most often it was because I was hungry, and then I'd put my phone away and enjoy whatever was in front of me. When it wasn't due to hunger, I sometimes changed my mind and didn't eat it, but not always. An easy way to tell when the latter happened is to look at the quality of my photos. When I made strawberry-basil-infused water that sat overnight, I couldn't stop taking photos of it the next morning until I had the perfect shot. I was proud of what I had made. Compare that to a photo of two chocolate doughnuts taken at 11 PM. That photo could probably win a worst food photography contest. I ate those donuts because I was sad and had a bad day, and I knew I didn't want proof of my emotional eating.
Photograph by April Rueb
I'll admit that when this experiment began, the most I expected to get out of it was a few photos for Instagram. But after taking more than 100 pictures over the course of 31 days, I'm shocked at how my relationship with food has changed. Now I'm much more thoughtful about what I choose to eat and when. And even though I no longer pull out my phone before eating, I continue to pause and ask myself: Why am I eating this? Those five little words will stay with me long after the photos have been deleted.
