Heyo,

A few days ago, I spent the morning filming content and my god, I suck. Like, really bad.

So bad that I'm pretty sure I managed to create a new type of motivational content––just watch me attempt to film a 90-second Reel and instantly feel better about yourself.

And I'm not gonna lie – there was a moment where we were 2 hours into filming and we'd only recorded one video that I was going to throw in the towel and stick to writing.

Thankfully, the voice of reason showed up and slapped me in the face with a reminder:

This is the suck, fuckface.

You don’t get to skip the suck. The only way to stop being bad at something is to do it badly enough times that you eventually get ok – dare I say, good – at it.

But there's a catch.

Just pushing through isn’t enough. If you’re not aiming at something, you’re just doing stuff for the sake of doing stuff, so you need to have a target that keeps you motivated and working towards something.

So here’s my target: 100 videos.

But there's another catch.

"Film 100 videos" is pointless if the 100th video is just as bad as the first. To solve this, there needs to be a process-goal. Something I can control and improve each time.

This prevents me from focusing on the wrong metric for 'success', like trying to go viral. A focus on the wrong metric is why everything on Instagram looks the same.

The same shitty 10-second B-roll with white text that, by the way, nobody can fucking read. The same hooks. The same annoying jump cuts. The same *waves vaguely at everything* sameness.

Thus, to avoid turning into a dancing monkey for a soulless algorithm, the goal needs to be paired with an actionable process that puts improvement at the centre.

The second video should be slightly better than the first. The third slightly better than the second, the...you get the point. That's the only success metric because it's something I can control and improve. Everything else – likes, views, followers – is just a distraction from the main goal: consistent, steady, gradual progress over time.

You know what else sucks? People's ability to accurately report how much they eat––which is what we're talking about next.

Food misreporting–how bad is it?

People are terrible at accurately reporting their food intake. Whether it’s underestimating portions, forgetting what they ate, or, well, just lying about how much they actually ate.

But this isn’t just a random quirk of human memory; it’s a systematic problem with serious implications for nutrition research and how people interpret that research.

Case in point, for years, there was a belief that people with obesity weren’t losing weight despite ‘hardly eating’ because there was something wrong with their metabolism. It later turned out their metabolism was totally fine; they were just grossly misreporting how much they ate. A great example of this is the classic 1992 study where ‘diet-resistant’ participants claimed they were eating ~1000 calories per day when they were actually eating 2000 calories per day. [1]

Recently, a group of scientists were (probably) like, “Fuck this shit, we’re going to find out just how bad this problem is.” [2]

Using a massive dataset of over 7,500 doubly labelled water (DLW) measurements—the gold standard for tracking energy expenditure—researchers developed a new predictive model to estimate how many people under- or over-report their food intake.

They then applied this model to two large dietary surveys (NDNS and NHANES) covering more than 18,000 people to see just how unreliable self-reported data really is.

Spoiler: It’s pretty bad.

Age and Under-Reporting

• On average, people in NDNS under-reported by about 835 kcal/day, while in NHANES, men under-reported by 430 kcal/day and women by 670 kcal/day.
  ​
• Children under 10 had fewer errors (because their parents were reporting their food intake). However, as kids got older and started self-reporting, they became just as inaccurate as adults—by age 16, their reporting errors matched those of the adults.

BMI and Under-Reporting

The higher someone’s BMI, the more they underreported their food intake.

• In NDNS (UK):
  • Adults with a BMI of 40 under-reported by 1,200 kcal/day.
  • Children with a BMI of 40 under-reported by a massive 2,150 kcal/day.
• In NHANES (US):
  • Adults with a BMI of 40 under-reported by 950 kcal/day.
  • Children with a BMI of 40 under-reported by 1,900 kcal/day.

But not only did people underreport – they reported eating better than they actually were, claiming to eat a higher percentage of protein and a lower percentage of fat.

In short

People suck at accurately reporting how much they’re eating. This study found that over 50% of dietary reports had “implausible energy intakes”, with the extent of misreporting increasing as BMI rose in both adults and children.

These results align with a previous systematic review and meta-analysis that found men and women misreported food intake by 300 to 1000 calories. [3]

To quote the authors:

This is why tracking your food intake, even if it's for a few months, matters. You can't fix a problem if you have no awareness of the problem.

Avoiding tracking is like avoiding looking at your bank account and then wondering why you're never able to save money.

Nutrition tracking isn't only about the tracking; it's about bringing awareness to your current habits so you know what needs to change.

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–Aa

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