The other day I had this a bit of a re-jig of my downstairs office at home.
I put three extra shelves up to clear off some of the stuff that was accumulating on the desk or just under it.
I put a metal plate on one of the walls and have a kitchen timer on it to enable me to do solid blocks of work, knowing when I’ll get a break.
I also ordered a little plastic drawer to go just under the desk and a long charging lead so that I had somewhere to put my phone away where it wasn’t in sight.
I read the dimensions of the description of the drawer on Amazon and it sounded bigger than my phone.
When it arrived, it looked clearly big enough so I drilled the hole in the back of the mounting frame, ran a charging cable through it and attached drawer at the underside of the desk.
The first time I tried to put my phone in there I immediately realised my error.
I hadn’t factored in that the cable would stick out of the back of the phone meaning it wouldn’t quite fit in and allow the drawer to close.
My error, of course was just estimating.
Doing, at best, rough estimations in my head and thinking that would be close enough.
And in life, rough estimations are sometimes enough.
But sometimes they’re not.
Sometimes we need a little bit more precision.
Something that we’re often missing when we look to change our eating.
We set out to just “eat less” or “eat better”.
Perfectly laudable ideas.
But probably the same ideas that we’ve had countless times before.
That ended up being ‘three steps forward, five steps back’.
Tracking our food with an app like MyFitnessPal to get a level of accuracy for 3 to 5 days is often eye-opening.
Our responses are nearly always “Wow. I didn’t realise that that had so many calories in”.
Or “I didn’t realise how much of that I ate (or drank)”.
We can use that more precise data to make some better choices.
Make some tactical swaps in what we eat for other options that we like just as much……….
Are equally filling…………
Are just as convenient………….
And no more expensive…………
That, maybe, contribute half to two thirds of the calories.
We gain the facts as to what is an appropriate portion size of something for someone of our size and activity levels.
And we have that knowledge going forward.
We don’t need to track everyday of our lives.
A few days to get some initial knowledge and then, maybe, a few days here and there to recalibrate is often more than enough.
Without precision, we’re doing, at best, an educated guess.
And if educated guesses work, that’s awesome.
If they don’t, on average, then maybe that extra precision is worth a little extra effort.
A minute or two of measuring my phone and giving some extra thought to the whole thing would have saved more time and effort downstream…………
As tracking can do with our eating.
Much love,
Jon ‘Got a new, bigger drawer sat next to me on the desk that I’ll be fitting shortly’ Hall
P.S. Sometimes I try and think of clever, and relevant, ways to insert this link in the blog. But I’m tired. So just go click in a change your life (with a Money Back Guarantee), yeah? —> www.myrise.co.uk/apply
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RISE in Macclesfield was established in 2012 and specialise in Group Personal Training weight loss programmes for those that don’t like the gym and find diets boring and restrictive!
