Tag: logging

What I learned from tracking my dinners for 365 days in 2025/2026

Do you struggle with deciding what to make for dinner each week? Do you find yourself making the same meals over and over? Do you want to dine out less or order less? If you answered Yes to any of those questions then you need to start tracking your meals. That’s what I did over the last year.

Since last October I’ve logged my dinners/suppers in a spreadsheet. I typed in the date, the meal, the quality of the meal, what was the main component of it and what were the sides, as well as who cooked it.

Why? I believed this could help me discover which dishes were the best, so I could resort to repeatedly cooking the same food every month. I wouldn’t have to wonder: what should I eat this week? I wouldn’t think: is this going to be any good? I could become a person who sticks to meal plan I could eat every month.

What I discovered that I was not someone who can eat the same thing over and over. In fact I was the opposite: of the 365 meals I had last year — some I cooked and some cooked by others — 2/3rds of them were unique! That’s 232 different dishes! The reasons for such variety vary. Some of that was due to eating dinner in a restaurant for one time only. Mainly though it is because I am always looking forward to having new dishes for dinner. I wish I was the kind of person who has spaghetti and meatballs every Monday and pizza for dinner every Friday, but I am not. I mostly love cooking and having new things to eat, and that shows in my logs.

What’s the star of the plate? The logs show mostly meat. Maybe too much meat. The leading meat is chicken, followed by ground meat, pork, beef and fish. It would be good to work more non-meat meals into the mix. Also more fish or shellfish.

As for the sides, it’s a range, from roast veg to potatoes to salad to rice. A nice change from when I was a kid and felt like I ate mashed potatoes every night. (I didn’t but it felt like that. So much so I rarely eat mashed potatoes now.) My goal in the new year is to eat less starchy sides and tracking can help with that.

Most meals I felt were Excellent or Very Good.  The lowest I’ve ever rated any meal — takeout, restaurant or home cooked — is Fair. I don’t think I had a Poor or Bad meal in the last year.

The other thing I discovered is the majority of meals I had were made by someone else: either my partner, or a restaurant. This has been a big change for me. For decades most of my meals were cooked in my own pots. It’s been a joy to simply sit down and enjoy someone else’s fine cooking every day.

The good thing about tracking meals like this is a) it is fast and easy to do b) it gives you a tool to think about how you are eating and change if you want. So if you want to change the way you eat, I highly recommend you do what I did and keep a log.

Good luck!

(Photo by Davey Gravy on Unsplash)

Do you log or journal? I recommend you do in 2023. Here’s why….


I was reviewing my logs and journals for 2022 just now. I was happily reminded of the good times I had as well as the difficult moments I had to deal with last year. I’m glad I took the time to record all that.

If you can, I recommend you do the same. Reading about your good times can make you feel good about your life. And reading about the difficulties you had to deal with can make you appreciate how well you deal with things.

Writing about good times is fairly easy. Writing about difficult times is not. To log my difficult moments, I phrase them in the way of praise. So instead of writing something like:

Absolute disaster at work this week. I hate my project!

I’ll write:

kudos for dealing well with the difficulties at work this week by persevering and staying calm

I find phrasing it that way helps to read about it later. (This is my approach: you may be fine with going with the first approach.) It also reminds my brain that I can deal with similar difficulties in the future.

Be prolific if you can. Note simple observations. Consider all your senses. Write down many good memories and good feelings you had throughout the year. It’s easy to forget about them, but like snapshots, just reading them will bring back vividly thoughts and emotions you want to recall years from now.

Log them using the media best suited for you. You might covet one of those One Line a Day journals. You might like scribbling in a plain notebook. Some people might default to their smartphone and social media to log things. (I find Instagram is good with that….Twitter…not so much.)

I depend on a little program I wrote called easylog that I use to record things. It stores the information both in a local XLSX spreadsheet and a Google spreadsheet. Of course there are countless ways you can log or journal, but that suits me. It takes me a few minutes every day…no time at all, really.

Good luck. I wish you fond memories of 2023.

P.S. This post was inspired by posts from bloggers I admire:

Austin Kleon in particular is a master at logging things. You might not want to do it to the extent he does (at first), so start with just a line or two. You’ll be glad in 6 months, a year, two years from now when you get to re-read them.

I was almost inspired to write my own wonderful things in 2022 in a blog post, but I am trying to focus my social media content to things that benefit people vs things about myself.   My goal is to have a ratio closer to 80:20 or even 90:10 (posts benefitting people: posts about myself). Let’s see.