What Exactly Is A Food Journal?

A food journal is honestly exactly what it sounds like. It's a journal that you use to track all of your food intake throughout the day. Food intake also includes what your drink, that's important to remember. The key reason for using a food journal is to have it as an aid to help you make adjustments to your diet. It also gives you an easy way to visualize your eating habits.

But What Are The Benefits?

It Aids In Weight Loss

A recent study shows that keeping a food journal may truly be one of the most successful ways to boost your weight loss success. Whats even more interesting is that the people with the biggest weight loss progress kept track of their eating habits more frequently. With the average time spent a day being about 15 minutes. I'd say thats a pretty small time loss for a large gain towards your goals.

Portion Control

This is a big one, especially with the ever increasing size of portions at restaurants and stores. It can be difficult to ensure you're not overeating, a food journal will help you keep track of the amount of food you've had. Being able to see at a quick glance, how much you eat during the day will make it easier to adjust going forward.

Identifying Food Intolerances

It's hard to remember everything that you've eaten within a whole day. Which makes it even more difficult to identify the culprit of the upset stomach you now have. With adverse reactions to foods normally taking a few hours to show up, trying to think back to what you had for lunch is probably going to be a very difficult thing. But if you had tracked your lunch to the detail, you'd now be able to look at your diary and narrow down the cause.

Find Causes Of Your Unhealthy Habits

This is probably one you didn't think of as you started to read this blog, and honestly it wasn't really one that was immediately apparent to me either.

Let's say you're at work, and Paula across the office just sent you 7 emails back to back hounding you to get something done that you've already sent to her 3 TIMES! Now you get up, go take yourself for a walk to calm down.

You're on this walk, minding your business when you see that bag of Doritos sitting in the vending machine mocking you. You decide to eat that bag of Doritos, now you feel great and the stress of Paula and her inability to locate the file you've sent her have melted away.

If you kept track of this in your food journal you'd be able to easily recognize that stressful situations cause you to snack far more than you normally do. Being able to see that little nugget of info will allow you to finally curb your stress eating and knock off those extra pounds that have been haunting you.

How To Be Successful With Your Journal

Make It Easy

If you keep your food journal in an actual journal then make your life a bit easier by drawing some simple graphs or tables to track your eating habit throughout the day.

If you don't like to write in journals or think this is too inconvenient for you, I have a solution! It's called the app store. There are a bunch of food journals out there that you can use, my favorite: MyFitnessPal

Keep It On You

This one is obviously super easy to do if you use a food journal app, because let's be honest here... Who doesn't always have their phone on them?

If you choose to write your journal, just make it part of your "Daily Carry" Items. If its easier, put it in your purse, backpack, laptop bag, briefcase or whatever it is that you always carry with you.

Having your journal with you and easily accessible will make you far more likely to continue to track your eating habits.

Schedule Reminders

If you find that you sometimes forget to keep track of what you're eating the easiest thing I've found to do is simply set an alarm on my phone for when I normally eat. I totally understand not remembering to track stuff ALL the time. So make your life simple and set a quick reminder in your phone.

Hopefully you've taken some useful info from this blog and have decided to finally start tracking what you're eating. The more you do it, the more you'll learn about your eating habits. The more you learn, the more you'll be able to adjust and make larger changes towards your goals.