Posted on June 12, 2015 by Jenny Cromack
Its simple……knowing what you eat will make a massive difference to achieving your health and fitness goals! What a better way to track this than by keeping a food diary. As personal trainers we encourage all of our clients to keep a food diary, whether it’s in a paper diary using one of the many apps around such as My Fitness Pal, or recording the details on an Excel sheet, we find that food diaries are the best way to give our personal training clients feedback about any improvements they can make to their eating habits.
Monitoring our client’s food intake through using food diaries is the backbone of our nutritional consultations. The information recorded on these food diaries allows us to provide our clients with solid advice about the foods they should be eating and how they can improve their eating habits and achieve their goals.
Whether you want to change the way you are eating, reduce sugar and salt in your diet, take steps to lose weight or simply create more awareness of what you eat, there is no better way than to keep a food diary.
Keeping a food diary has so many benefits such as:
1. Accountablility
One great reason to keep a food diary is to stay accountable, whether it’s to yourself or to your personal trainer. This is especially true if losing weight or body fat is the ultimate goal. No one else knows what you put into your mouth each day but you, and writing it down will help you stay accountable.
2. Tracks Your Intake
Most people go through the day picking and grazing on different foods without realising what they are actually eating. By keeping a food diary you can keep track of everything that you eat – are you eating enough carbohydrates, protein and fat? Do you drink enough water? Are there any big gaps between meals?
3. Habits
Keeping a food diary will let you see if there are particular habits surrounding your eating, Do you eat when you’re bored? Do you go to the vending machine every time you make a coffee at work? Do you snack on biscuits when you watch TV? Do you eat when you’re stressed? We often eat without even realising it, or the odd biscuit here and there will have crept in and now be a habit without you even knowing. A food diary will let you see all of your bad habits as well as the good.
4. Identifies Any Weaknesses
Some people aren’t even aware of their food weaknesses until it is written down and a pattern is clearly developed. You may not even realise how many times you reach into the cupboard for a cookie until you actually start to track your intake. Or how much those daily lattes add up.
A great benefit to keeping a food diary is finding out what you need more of. Writing down what you eat will help you realise where you are falling short, as far as nutrients. For instance, you may not realise that you are not getting enough vegetables in your daily diet until you see it written in black and white.
5. Identifies Your Strengths
Don’t we love focusing on the negatives, I must eat less ‘x’, I must cut out ‘y’, BUT also use your food diary to highlight the good things you are doing and what you need to continue to do more off.
6. Tracks Your Progress
When you start to make positive changes in your diet, a food diary will allow you to recognise these positive changes over time. This is a motivating experience and will increase your chances of long term success. When you have been writing your food diary for 1 month, look back at your first week’s food diary and make a positive note of all the positive changes you have made and how this has affected your life such as energy levels, body fat, sleep, etc.
7. Helps You Plan Healthy Meals
A food journal can help you start to plan healthy meals. By tracking your daily intake and recognising where there are shortages, it becomes easier to plan for meals that make up for deficits. If you plan your meals for the full week you’re also more likely to stay on track with your healthy eating plan rather than grabbing a take away or ready meal because there is nothing in the fridge!
7. Becomes a Grocery List
Along the same lines as meal planning, a food diary can also be utilised for creating a healthy foods grocery list. Knowing what you are eating and what you need to eat more of will give you ideas for your grocery shopping. You can even designate certain pages of your food diary for grocery lists.
Top Tips To Keeping A Food Diary
1. As Quick As Possible
It is important to write down what you eat and drink as soon as possible this will ensure you don’t forget what you have eaten.
2. Write As Much Detail As Possible
Write down as much detail about how much, how was it cooked, the type of food, when you ate/drank, was it a particular brand, were you in a particular mood, etc.
3. Be Honest!
It is important that you are 100% honest when filling in your food diary. It becomes a wasted exercise if you don’t include naughty ‘treats’ such as chocolate bars or crisps. Seeing everything in front of you will allow you to see clearly how many times you treat yourself and can be accountable for the time you maybe don’t reach a target you set.
Keeping a food diary allows you to workout if your eating not only the right things but the right amount. Under eating can be just as detrimental to your fitness goals as overeating. Everyone is individual so make sure you are eating correctly for your fitness goals taking into account your bod composition, training goals and energy expenditure.
If you feel you need more support to ensure you are following the correct eating plan then click here to read about our nutritional consultation packages.