To eat better

YOUR TEST

For one month, note all your food and drink intake in real time. No cheating.

YOUR RESULTS

You’ll know what, when and how much you’ve consumed, which will help you identify unhealthy patterns.

YOUR MISSION

First, assess and improve what you routinely eat and drink at home. Fill your kitchen with perishables. ‘Poultry, fish, beef, dairy, fruit and vegetables should make up the bulk of our diet,’ says nutritionist Tara Collingwood. Eating these foods doesn’t just promote optimal athletic performance; it also reduces your risk of heart disease, diabetes, stroke and cancer.

If your diet is already fairly healthy, look to see if you can identify a pattern in your lapses. Do you stress-eat chocolate biscuits from the food altar in the office? Do you overdose on snacks while you’re preparing dinner? Do you dine out multiple times per week and do your healthy-eating rules go out of the window at restaurants? Simply identifying your times of weakness may help you do better in the future, especially if you continue to log your eating in the long term. When you’re tracking – with a smartphone app or just a pen and paper – ‘everything you eat becomes real, so you can’t pretend it didn’t happen’, says Corkum.

Once you’ve managed the damage of your worst dietary habits, examine the foods you eat regularly to see what you might drop for healthier options. For example, you might choose to smother your morning toast with natural peanut butter (with no added sugar) instead of the sugar-loaded favourite lurking in your cupboard, or to swap the chips that normally snuggle up next to your steak for a more virtuous sweet potato. Over time, small changes add up to big results.