Food is simple — until your body tells you otherwise.
When I first got married, I wanted to share more with my wife. She’s a vegetarian, and whenever we ate together or sat down with her family, I joined her. No meat on my plate. At first, I thought I was being healthier. More vegetables, less heavy food.
For a couple of months, it seemed fine. But then my body started to disagree. Constipation, bloating, a sense of heaviness that didn’t make sense. I kept asking myself, How can I feel this bad if I’m eating so many vegetables?
I was confused, and one day while giving a golf lesson, I mentioned it to a student of mine who happened to be a food nutritionist. She gave me a piece of advice that changed everything: keep a food journal.
Now, this wasn’t a diary where you pour out three hundred words a day. It was simple: one line per day. Date, what I ate, and what my stool was like the next day. That’s it. Convenient, not a burden. The key was to look back after a few weeks and see the patterns.
Sure enough, a pattern appeared. In Taiwan, a lot of vegetarian meals include tofu products. Every time I ate those, the bloating and constipation showed up.
My friend explained it like this: our gut bacteria adapt to what we eat growing up. East Asians who eat tofu regularly usually have the bacteria to break it down. But I grew up in the US, where tofu wasn’t a regular part of my diet. So even though I was eating plenty of vegetables and fiber, my body struggled to handle tofu as a main protein source.
That explained everything. And once I cut back, I felt normal again. I can still enjoy tofu, but not in large quantities, and not as a full replacement for protein.
Later, when I started intermittent fasting to manage my diabetes risk, I used the same simple journaling method. I logged when I ate, what I ate, and how I felt. It showed me my body worked best with one meal a day, usually after 2 or 3 PM. My waistline shrank, blood sugar stayed steady, and digestion smoothed out.
The lesson was simple but powerful. A food journal doesn’t fix problems by itself. What it does is shorten the distance between discomfort and solution. Without it, you guess. With it, you see.
Food isn’t just fuel. It’s a relationship between body, culture, and stage of life. What works for my wife won’t always work for me, and what works for me today may not work ten years from now. A journal keeps me honest and aware.
If you’ve ever felt like your diet wasn’t working but couldn’t put your finger on why, try it. One week of writing down what you eat and how you feel. That’s it. You might be surprised at what your body is trying to tell you.
➡️ This is just one piece of a bigger idea I call Performance Journaling — the practice of using simple logs to spot patterns and solve problems faster. In golf, food, or business, journaling shortens the distance between mistake and solution.