The drinks I stopped counting as nothing

For a long stretch I logged food carefully and drank without recording any of it. Water is nothing, so everything liquid was nothing. That is not how it works.

The audit

One ordinary Tuesday I wrote down everything I drank, purely to see the total:

• Three coffees with milk.
• A large glass of orange juice with breakfast.
• A fizzy drink in the afternoon, because it was hot.
• Two beers in the evening, which I had genuinely not thought about.

The total was somewhere north of eight hundred calories. Not one of those items felt like a decision about food at the time. Together they were most of a day's deficit, undone without a single meal being involved.

What changed, and what did not

I did not stop drinking any of it. What changed was that it goes in the log, which turns out to be enough on its own - things that get recorded get noticed, and things that get noticed get moderated without much effort.

The juice went first, because it was the least missed per calorie. Coffee stayed, with less milk. The beer is still there and now competes with dinner for the same room in the budget, which is a fair contest and one I sometimes lose.

Nothing here is forbidden. It just has to be counted like everything else.