I hope eventually to get to the point where this is all
well-entrenched habit and I can pretty much not worry wo much about
it. I agree, stopping tracking has its bad points.

I may experiment some with tracking food less, but just results
instead. That would take off some of the day to day hassle, but make
me keep tabs on measurements (taken monthly) and overall weight
(usually daily).

Right now though, I feel like the tracking is a good idea for me. I'm
hoping to get the good eating habits well set in stone, but it's all
too easy to regress. One thing tracking does, if you eat something not
so ideal... you have to confront just how many calories it cost you,
as well as seeing how little protein/fiber, how much fat/sugar you've
put in your system.

Heaven knows, I've been there, and done that. Though it has usually
been a stress/life event thing that has first thrown me off good
eating habits and then I start to lose the tracking and ah, "walk
blind".

The only thing I can say is that so far, I've at least never exceeded
my highest weight. So at some point, I take the blinders off again.

People have to apply tracking to variables so they could limit the
impact of something they can't predict or control.

In investing, you track volatile holdings because they are
unpredictable. If you put your money into some safe, ``guaranteed'',
debt-based instrument, you don't monitor it everyday, because it
doesn't do anything surprising! On the other hand, if you put money
into individual stocks, you do monitor them, and the more volatile
they are, the more frequently you do that.

The reason people monitor their diets is because they have no
accountability, but want to /pretend/ that they have it.

What tracking allows them to do is to pretend that the contents of the
diet are some external influence which happens /to/ them, like the
fluctuation of a stock price. Eating isn't something that is done /by/
them, voluntarily.  The hand which grabs the food, and the mouth which
opens to receive it, are out of control. But, oh, in the tracking
there is shrewd discipline!

Anothe reason for tracking, one somewhat more legitimate, is that it
allows variety. You can eat different things everyday. The answer to
that is /not/ to eat different things everyday. Find interests that
don't involve primitive stimulation of the lower brain centers,
emanating from the taste buds.

I've never tracked what I eat. But of course, I do control what I eat.
That's precisely why I don't need tracking, for the same reason that
if, for instance, I could control the prices of stocks, I wouldn't
track them either. I'd be too busy trading to get rich, and I could do
that by picking one stock and executing a simple pattern of control
and trade, repeatedly.

This is me, coming in for a 41:14 10K finish last Sunday, in the
centre of the photo:

http://ieinnovative.netfirms.com/Photos/Events/SR07/8/WM/W56278.jpg

I did once weigh over 250 pounds.

My approach to eating is simple: I eat almost the same thing everyday.
If I were to track it, it would be row after row of nearly the same
thing. I could basically just cut and paste the contents of the log
hundreds of days into the future. Where there are deviations, they are
very easy to estimate.

I used to track my running and other exercise in a detailed way. But
that also became so regular, that the daily entries started to
resemble each other and the weeks became nearly identical. So I
stopped.