Tips for Keeping a Food Diary

(432 Words)
A food diary or food journal helps you lose weight and keep itoff. According to WebMD, the added awareness helps improve your diet. Themore detailed you get, the better. If possible, include serving sizeof what you eat as well as the calorie content. There are many waysthat to keep a food diary—use a step-by-step approach and make a plan you can stick with.
Pick a format
First, you should decide whether you want your food diary to be onpaper, or if you want it to be in digital form. There are advantagesto each. Because you want to write down everything you eat it isadvantageous to have something that you can carry with you. A smallpiece of paper folded and kept in a pocket might be a simple and yeteasy way to keep a record. Almost everyone has room for a small pieceof paper and it is light. A disadvantage is that it will make itharder to keep all of the information together like you can if youhave it all in a digital file.
There’s an app for that
A digital file allows you to easily store the information. Ofcourse you need something to carry with you . Many people now carrysmart phones that are able to hold and organize food diaryinformation. Specialized digital applications (or “apps”) make it even easier foryou to record and store information.
Record every morsel
When keeping the food diary it is necessary to record everythingyou eat per the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. You shouldnot leave out a single thing, because that will provide an inaccuraterecord and make it difficult for you to keep track of what you eatand plan your meals.
Count calories
You also want to calculate your calories. The advantage of manyfood apps is that they will help you do this. They may haveinformation such as the amount of calories in a particular food. Thisis not an exact science since the same food item can have vastlydifferent calories depending on the restaurant and how it isprepared. For instance, a very small hamburger might have 400calories, whereas a large one covered in toppings can have well over a1,000 calories. Try to find nutritional information if you go torestaurants and put that data in the food diary. If you are keeping it on paper, then justwrite it down.
You should keep track of what you eat through your food diary. Monitor general calorie intake, and adjust your diet to fulfillany weight loss needs. With an accurate food diary, a healthier lifeis only a few notebook pages away.