If you are serious about weight loss and are playing to win, a food diary is one of the tools that can help you to succeed. If you don’t want to keep a food diary, the best alternative is to record your calorie intake in a calorie-tracking app.
It doesn’t matter whether you track your calories in the traditional way using a food diary, or using a more modern approach. All that matters is your calories are tracked.
Some food diaries are very simple. Others are more complex. Keeping a simple diary will allow you to record what you have eaten and how many calories your food provided. A more complex diary may also help you uncover eating triggers and other factors that affect your eating habits and hinder your efforts to lose weight.
Food Diary Basics
Experts suggest using a food diary that enables you to log everything you eat and drink every day. Yep! It’s not just about food, the things we drink contain calories too.
A good food diary should have sections that allow you to record your portion sizes, how many helpings you ate (hopefully just one) and the number of calories the food has delivered to your body.
If you don’t have accurate weights and measures to record and/or don’t know how many calories are involved you can guess the calories. However, if you really want to get that body of your dreams you’ll log everything as accurately as you can. With no cheating. If you cheat, the only person you are cheating is yourself.
Remember: Your food diary is there to help you. It’s meant to be your friend.
In addition to recording what you ate, a good food diary allows you to record the time of day you ate and the location. The best ones may also have room for you to record your emotional state while eating.
If you need a food diary template the American Cancer Society website has a pretty good one you can download as a free PDF. Here’s the link.
If you want to buy a food diary, that’s possible too. There are many options available to buy online, but any book will do. It’s what you write inside it that counts, not what’s written on the cover.
Food Diary Benefits
If you get a food diary and commit to using it to keep track of all the food you eat it can help you in many ways.
It’s hard to deny or forget about unhealthy food choices when you see them staring back at you from the page. The very act of writing them down also forces you to take responsibility for your mealtime misdemeanors. It gives you no room for excuses if your diet is wrong your food diary will show you why you cannot lose weight.
When you know you are going to log every cake, piece of chocolate, or can of coke you will be less inclined to throw caution to the wind and indulge. Keeping a food diary also helps you to be aware of your portion sizes at mealtimes.
It’s not just about logging your eating habits though. When you have a food diary it gives you valuable data you can use. If you suddenly gain weight, an examination of your food diary data will likely reveal where you have gone wrong.
If you use the Diet Pill Ninja Food Diary template or a similar option, examining the entries may also help you pinpoint your emotional triggers.
Perhaps being in the company of a certain person causes you stress that makes you comfort eat. Maybe you will see you always eat more when you are with a particular individual and realize they always insist “one more won’t hurt” and “You’ll burn it off in no time”.
By helping you discover the problem areas, a good food diary can help you take the necessary action and oil the wheels of your weight loss success.
A Food Diary is the “Write” Way to Lose Weight
It doesn’t matter why are keen to lose weight. Maybe you are tired of the way you look. Perhaps you had a recent health scare or have simply decided “It’s time”. Either way, you’ve decided to take action and keeping a food diary will help.
Knowledge is power and, by arming you with the knowledge of what you are really eating, your food diary can give you the power to make lasting change for the better.
