Diet Diary
- Hits: 8057
Keeping a Diet Diary is an excellent first step in assessing how you eat and why you eat the way you do. It will help you target your current problems and look into the root of them. In the end, it will also help you to design the eating plan that is best for you. Here are some things you can track with a Diet Diary:
- Assess your reasons for eating (aside from true hunger)
- Gauge your appetite and/or cravings
- Track your portion sizes
- Record your feelings after eating
Why Are Diet Diary Benefits Important to Your Success?
A diet diary – also known as a nutrition journal or even sometimes simply called a calorie tracker at its most basic level – can seem like a nuisance, but its benefits are far reaching. In fact, many people find that it completely alters their understanding of their nutrition and the relationship they have with their food.
This means that keeping up a diet diary can produce complex and potentially long-term benefits toward your weight management throughout your life. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to maintain your food journaling throughout your entire life. However, the lessons you learn from having done it throughout your weight loss can be lasting. Moreover, many people return to the practice now and again just to make sure they’re still on track.
Let’s take a closer look at the aforementioned diet diary benefits and what they do for you.
Assessing Your Reasons for Eating
Keeping a diet diary helps you to take a closer look at why you’re eating. You can see that you’ve already had a certain amount of food today. Are you truly in need of more food or is there something else going on such as habit, boredom or another kind of emotional eating? Tracking helps you to spot trends behind your motivations to eat.
Gauge Your Appetite and/or Cravings
Looking back over your nutrition journal, does it look like you’re always digging into sweets in the middle of the afternoon? Do you seem to grab for the bag of chips about an hour after dinner? This gives you the chance to assess your hunger levels and when cravings for less-than-healthy foods seem to kick in.
With that information, you can make changes to your lifestyle to overcome those issues. For instance, you can eat an apple or a bowl of berries and nuts before you start to crave that mid-afternoon candy bar. You can pop a bag of popcorn even before you would otherwise have chips.
Track Your Portion Sizes
A Diet Diary brings awareness to your eating habits. It helps you to become accountable for the food you’re eating. By recording everything, you can have a look at the portions of each dish that you’re putting on your plate. Are you really filling half your plate with veggies and dividing the rest between lean protein and whole grains? Maybe not! This will help you to see that.
Record Your Feelings After Eating
By recording the way you feel after you eat, you can discover the relationship you have with your food. Do you feel satisfied and energized? Great! Do you feel tired, stuffed and guilty? Not so great. Learn more about what your eating habits are doing to you so you can make the right improvements.
Go to Print Diet Diary for an example of a Daily Diet Dairy. We suggest that you print at least two sheets for each day of the week.