Recently I went on a trip to India where so much was going on I stopped using my meal tracking. And on this trip the other thing that happened was that half the time, I was in a plane, waiting for a plane, or on a bus –or on the back of a Maruti Suzuki offroad Jimny– or otherwise sedentary. And yet, after the brief 10 day trip, I carved off an inch and a half off my waist and dropped over 6 pounds on the scale. (Side note, I know that “intra-day” variability can be high, because I have personally seen a reset of 5 pounds , within a day’s worth of eating, answering the call of nature and exercising, and so on, but “inter-day” variability, should be lower, when you weigh-in at a consistent time of day).
The funniest moment example of this outcome came towards the end of the trip where lots of people on the trip we went into the ocean to do some gentle wave floating. So among lots of individuals with their shirts off the topic of diet comes up inevitably and friends told me I looked pretty cut but I said yea that’s only because I have a TOFI body type and I spend most of my time with my gut squeezed in out of sheer embarassmsnt. They didn’t believe me so I figured okay I’m among people I should feel comfortable around and hey I’m on a relaxing beach, let me let loose. So I did, I unclenched my gut and then the laughter was roaring. Evidently the delta was not noticeable. I was told I have some major body self image issues. This is true, but what actually also happened is, looking later in a mirror, I confirmed that this trip literally leaned out my waist to the point that the gut I was pulling in at that point was all in my mind.
So what happened? Well I wasn’t tracking meals as I had been for years, so I don’t have data but anecdotally I know that I did not have access to the typical snack foods I typically engage in , a bit ad libidum, to top off my evenings. On my trip, my meals were pretty regimented and pretty public and there was no western world style grocery store for me to enter to even find the usual snacks I was used to. I did smuggle some protein bars into my carry on but I did not check any luggage on this trip so every gram of protein was competing with an article of clothing on this trip.
This pattern happens to me as well when I visit family, staying over a different house in a suburb over a dew days. My access to indulgence is low and there is no cheat code grocery store I can use for a rescue.
Ultimately I wasn’t tracking meals (and snack meals), because calorie counting was producing a self restriction that worked on my mind, but because I was hoping to correlate historical diet data against biomarker outcomes, month to month. But the thing is, for me personally, the availability of snacks around me seems to be a more important factor.
I have seen a similar factor play out in my stretch of “Alternate Day Feasting”, tongue in cheek, my year of eating fewer snacks every other day, https://michal.piekarczyk.xyz/post/2023-03-25--alternate-day-fasting/ . Perhaps a mix of these two ideas, physical and logical restrictions , are what I should try next.