Focus on Numbers
If you want to track your fat and calorie intake, be sure to keep a nutrient guide book handy or use a food database online. Don't have a book you can take with you? Draw a chart in the front of your food diary notebook with the foods you eat most often and then refer to it each time you record those foods.
Now, create a column for the name of the food and the required number of columns for each of the nutrients you will track. Divide the columns into section according to meal and/or time of day. Don't cheat yourself by not writing down everything including what you drink and snack food you may pick up without even thinking about it. Office birthday parties are especially tricky traps!
Then at the end of the day, add up your totals. Compare them to your goal totals. Your dietician or weight loss program has probably recommended a certain number of fat grams, calories, etc. Please don't berate yourself if you have gone over your goal. Remember, you are taking this one day at a time.
Focus on Portions
If you are not interested in keeping tally of your fat and calories, try writing down how much you eat. If you can't figure out where your extra weight is coming from, it may be that you are overeating and don't know it. If you sit down with a whole bag of chips and finish them off, that's one thing. But perhaps you're taking the chips out in handfuls - maybe you don't realize you're eating the whole bag! Keeping track in a food diary will help you to be honest with yourself. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can fool yourself all the time if you try hard enough!
Focus on Feelings
If your focus is more on the reasons why you eat the way you do, you may want to spend more reflective time on your diary. After you have eaten, write down why you ate (hunger, boredom, etc.) and how you feel afterwards (guilty, deserving, etc.). You may want to create a scale from 1 to 4 showing how bad your craving was. Perhaps you should make note of the time you overeat so you can plan to arrange other activities in the future that will take your mind off of food.
Here are some examples of questions you may want to answer when you eat:
- How were you feeling before you ate?
- Did you feel "gut hunger?"
- Who were you with?
- Did you eat hurriedly or calmly?
- Can you recall everything you ate?
- Did you eat normal portions?
- Were you doing an activity while you were eating?
- How do you feel now (e.g. satisfied, healthy, guilty)?
- Overall was this a positive or negative eating experience?
When you see everything you can do with a food diary, there's no reason not to do one! Get started right now! You don't have to wait for a special day or a special meal. Just do it.
