How & Why to Keep a Food Diary.

Although I have not yet met with my dietitian (hopefully next week!), I have had to complete some things as a pre assessment.  As I talked about in my first video blog, I had to keep a food diary; I had to record (in lots of detail) everything I ate and drank over a period of three days. Although I was only required to do it for a few days I am still keeping track of everything I consume. I never really thought of myself as a bad eater…until I started to keep track of what I was really eating every day. In order to keep a proper food diary it is important to write down / record EVERYTHING that you eat, drink, chew etc. Not only do you need to keep track of what you eat but you need to keep track of serving sizes. I suggest using measuring cups / spoons. You want to be as accurate as possible. I was surprised (kind of) that what I call 1 serving of food, is really 2 servings on the nutrition label. An example of this would be cereal. Most nutrition labels on cereal boxes are for serving sizes of ¾ - 1 cup of cereal. Most people (at least most people I know) are pouring a lot more than that in their bowl each morning. Let me say this again, you need to keep track of everything. This includes measuring the amount of milk you pour into your bowl too. Measure the amount of creamer and sugar that you add to your coffee. Don’t just write down burger; write 1 tablespoon of ketchup, 1 slice of cheese, lettuce, onions, and the corresponding calorie content of each… Get the point? It is scary to see how fast the calories add up. Note: it is important to write your food down as you consume it, do not wait until the end of the day as there is no way you will remember everything you ate. There are a number of reasons why I am stressing the importance of a food diary and why I think that you should keep one too (at least do it for a few days).The reason that keeping a food record has been so helpful for me is that it has forced me to see how healthy and unhealthy different types of food really are. I know you’ve heard the importance of eating your fruits and veggies each day, not only are they full of lots of nutrients but as I’ve come to find out, they are also really low in calories in comparison to processed, or what I refer to as “man made” foods. Also, by sticking to a calorie budget (which number I will not release until the nutritionist tells me that it’s an appropriate one) I am forced to make my food selections wisely. The reason why keeping track of calories has been working so well for me over the past couple of weeks is due to the fact that I am not being forced to totally cut certain foods out. I have tried just about every fad diet there is out there… A lot of them, for example the Atkins diet, encourage you to cut out certain types of food (carbs) and consume lots of another (protein). I ate so much egg & bacon (protein) over a period of a few months once that the smell and sometimes even just the look of them make me nauseous now. As I said above I have been sticking to a calorie budget which I set for myself. As soon as I meet with my dietitian I will let you know how to calculate an appropriate budget for yourself.

There are lots of free food diary templates on Google, as well as some awesome phone apps that I use and highly recommend. If you have an iPhone or iPad (not sure if other AT&T phones can access the same apps or not, hopefully they can) the iTunes app store has a free application called “Lose It”. Verizon has an app called “My Fitness Pal” (also available on iPhone) which I have not personally used but it looks pretty similar to Lose It and is also free of charge. These applications are great because they allow you to keep track of your calorie intake and calories burned from working out. They both have huge food nutritional content databases so no matter where you are, eating at home or at a restaurant, you can quickly look up how many calories is in something. I’m not sure whether you can do this with My Fitness Pal but Lose It has another cool feature; you can connect with your friends and other users of the app and share progress with each other. I have not tried it yet but if anybody is interested in “connecting” with my Lose It account let me know and we can try to figure out how to do it!