If you’re anything like me you find yourself compulsively watching “What I Eat In A Day” videos more often than you’d like to admit. The first ones I ever saw were the Harper’s Bazaar celebrity “Food Diaries” videos where they would interview celebs and ask them what they typically eat in a day. I don’t know why, but these videos had me captivated. Uhhhh yeah I desperately want to know everything that Gwyneth Paltrow ate today!!

When I was younger and much more body conscious I admit I loved watching these videos because they promised to give me some insight into what diet creates the perfect celebrity body (something every female on the planet has yearned for at least some point in her life). When TikTok came around, WIEIAD videos became much more colloquial and normalized. Everyone seemed to be making them, especially the fitness influencer community. Nowadays it’s gotten downright out of control. Supermodels and bodybuilders and trad moms alike are making videos documenting what they supposedly eat in a typical day. For a long time I wondered if people really eat like they do in those videos….3 perfectly timed meals, with healthy portioned snacks in between at their appropriately allotted times. Aesthetically curated, trendy, and seemingly bullshit.

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The thing is, I’ve never been a person who eats like that. I’m what you might call a grazer. A little of this, little of that, snacking straight out of the pantry or the fridge. Often not finishing things completely but leaving them half eaten on the shelf to be eaten later. (Ask my mom, when we lived together she was always griping about my half eaten granola bars and bananas lying around). As I’ve gotten older and my eating habits have become more regulated and less borderline-disordered I now find myself eating closer to what looks like 3 square meals a day. But I will always, and I mean always, be snacking little bits of this and that here and there.

I wanted to create a WIEIAD documentation that honestly shows every single thing I put in my mouth on a given day. To add to this, I cook professionally, meaning I spend a lot of my time around food. As a cook you have to taste things. You have to sample things for flavor and seasoning and try foods that you are testing recipes on, even when you’re not hungry, even when it’s not your designated meal time. It’s just part of the gig, and I love it. I love using my palate to adjust, tweak and perfect flavors, but cooks and chefs famously have very strange, disjointed diets. They often never sit down to eat their food and go hours and hours without having a proper meal. How strange that in an industry that is completely and solely centered on food the norm is to never sit down to eat a meal while working. To me this is an antiquated notion and something I strongly intend to not carry as a cook myself, so I make it a point to stop working, sit down for 10 minutes and actually eat my food. This food diary is an attempt to normalize eating in a way that is imperfect, uncurated and entirely human. So here’s every single thing I ate on August 9, 2025.

7:15 am: I wake up and start my day with my new favorite health ritual: psyllium husk dissolved in water with a splash of ACV and 2 scoops of Zeolite (for heavy metal detox). I’ve changed my morning health ritual countless times throughout the years but this is the one I’m into right now.

7:20 am: After slugging down my gloopy husk sludge I cleanse my palate with a healthy swig of organic A2 whole milk straight out of the carton. This is kind of an unplanned ritual for me and something I do every morning because I just looooove my whole milk.

7:24 am: I make my favorite morning beverage, a warm cacao drink. It’s basically a hot chocolate but with way less sugar. Nothing to feel bad about here because - may I remind you - chocolate is a health food!

8:18 am: I drink some of my homemade kefir straight out of the jar. Made from the same organic A2 whole milk I had earlier. I really love my milk.

8:19 am: I make 3 eggs for breakfast and dump a bunch of black beans on top of them that I cooked the other day. I cover this all with some green hot sauce. I almost never have the appetite to eat eggs this early in the day but I force myself to because if I don’t eat a good savory breakfast I’ll be absolutely ravenous by 10am while I’m at work. I don’t finish them because I get the egg ick.

9:18 am: At work I make an Italian meringue and have a small spoonful to taste. I don’t necessarily need to taste test this because I follow the recipe exactly but I like to check the texture. Also I like to have a little sweet something after every meal…..

9:29 am: My coworker makes me a 2oz iced coffee drink that tastes exactly like a canned Starbucks double shot. Carrageenan flavor and all. It’s fantastic.

11:39 am: I taste test the ice cream base I made the day before to assess the amount of rum in it because we received a complaint that the ice cream was too boozy. We all conclude it’s great.

11:57 am: I’m starting to get hangry and family meal is still nowhere in sight so I drink some of my kefir while standing in the walk-in.

1:20 pm: I have a small handful of shredded unsweetened coconut while a decorate a coconut cake… again another compulsive thing I simply can’t not do.

1:27 pm: Family meal is ready at long last. It’s a frittata with potatoes and local green salad. I cover it in off-brand sriracha. It’s not even 1:30pm and I’m already having eggs for the second time today. I take my food to the office and sit down to eat because, like I said, I don’t want to be one of those chefs that never sits down to eat a meal. Also I will take any excuse to sit down at work.

1:54 pm: I’m craving a little taste of something sweet so I have a tiny bit of coconut milk out of an 8oz deli cup.

2:33 pm: The afternoon slump is hitting hard and I desperately need a hit of dopamine. I reach for some scraps of mango ulu bread that have been sitting on a plate on the counter all day. It scratches the itch.

2:38 pm: I finish making a giant batch of coconut pastry cream and have a tiny spoonful to taste the salt content because yesterday someone commented that it was too salty. Tastes good to me.

4:52 pm: I taste some of the chocolate cake batter that I finish mixing (seeing a theme here?). Again I didn’t necessarily need to taste this, but it was almost 5 o’clock and I will take any excuse to taste cake batter.

5:17 pm: Right around this time everyday I start to get ravenously hungry. I don’t get off work until 7 and I can almost never make it that long without eating something of substance. I go into the walk-in and find a plastic deli container of the chicken cacciatore pasta I made for family meal the day before. I eat it cold.

7:06 pm: At this point I don’t want any more sweet treats, I really just want to go home and make a chicken caesar and call it a day. But the chefs tell me to take a bite of the 4 layer POG cake because we’ve been testing the recipe. I don’t really want to, but I take a bite. It’s good.

7:36 pm: Home at long last, I begin working on what I call my 6-minute caesar. Just a caesar salad that I make in approximately 6 minutes. While my chicken is cooking in the cast iron pan I eat 2 generous pieces of parmesan that I cut straight off the block.

7:41 pm: 6 minute caesar is complete and I eat it probably faster than I should have while watching RHONY.

9:14 pm: I take 2 magnesium glycinate pills, which, I’m not even sure how effective these are anyway, but the placebo effect is enough for me!

Everything I Actually Ate Today

You are what you eat