Keeping track of daily food intake with a food diary or journal has been found to be effective for many people to help them maintain a healthy weight. Food journaling is also helpful for those with emotional food issues as it provides a place to document those feelings and help discern them from true hunger. Other health activities can be tracked in a food journal like exercise habits, blood pressure, meditation time, or any other health goals.
Journaling habit helps by:
- Knowing that you will be recording what you are currently eating puts the brakes on how much you will eat as you are no longer engaged in “mindless eating.” The act of writing it down activates parts of your brain that can go idle and lead to over consumption.
- Recalling what you have previously eaten in a day also leads one to exert greater control over the current meal. Thinking about those 2 large pancakes loaded with syrup from breakfast can help steer away from a higher calorie lunch option. Again, this helps to engage your thinking with your eating habits and prevent mindless eating.
- Laziness can pay off. If you have written down all of the normal number of meals you normally eat and are tempted to eat more, not feeling up to more writing is another detraction from eating more.
- An accurate and helpful food diary is one that contains measures of food. There is a big difference between 1 cup of chips versus 1 8-cup bag of chips so merely recording “chips” does not give enough information. After many days of measuring and recording, one gets better at estimating and eyeballing food portions so after while there is no longer a need for measuring cups, spoons, and scales.
I have had many food journals over the years but none in the recent past. So I needed a fresher experience to recall. I have been recording my food intake now for the past 2 weeks. It has been an interesting experiment for me. I have also added in some other goals to keep track of like water consumption, exercise time, and belly fat measurements.
