Do I Really Need A Food Journal?

You might not realize all the food you eat throughout the day. Mindless eating, those bits and pieces of food, handfuls of nuts, chips or candy eaten throughout the day can add extra calories, no matter how faithful you are to eating healthy at meals. If you’re having a problem losing weight and mindless snacking is your problem, you’ll identify it when you keep a food journal.

Food journals can help you make smarter choices.

Tracking all the food you eat can be quite eye-opening. You start to see a pattern of higher calorie foods like ones with added sugar. Exactly what is a food journal? It’s simply tracking everything you eat. Some people denote other information, like how they felt when they ate that food, such as angry, sad or frustrated, to see if there’s an emotional connection. By analyzing your results, you can find foods to substitute for those high calorie selections.

You need to track what you drink, too.

You might not realize that your soft drink or favorite Starbucks drink may be the culprit that’s putting on weight, unless you journal. An 8-oz soft drink is about 100 calories, while a 20-oz Mocha Frappuccino is about 500! A soft drink every day offers enough calories to cause you to gain a pound in a little over a month. A Mocha Frappuccino a day will pack a pound in a week. Record what you drink, it’s extremely important.

Food journaling can help with more than just weight loss.

As noted previously, you can learn a lot from a food journal. You can identify emotional factors that cause you to overeat if you note your feelings. Including information about your health and how you felt after a meal can help identify food intolerance and food allergies. If you have digestive issues, just reviewing the days you had a problem might tell you if lactose, gluten or other food or ingredient caused the problem.

• Keeping a food diary is important for anyone that has a condition that the doctor can’t identify whether it’s exhaustion, a skin condition or problems with digestion. It can provide the clues that help eliminate the problem.
• You can make keeping a food diary simple. Just use your phone to take notes, pictures or for a voice recording during the day and transfer it all to paper when your day ends. Doing it that way gives you a chance.
• Don’t forget to include those handfuls, spoonsful or isolated single bites of food. You’ll be surprised at how many bites, handfuls and spoonful’s you eat during the week and how their calories add up.
• Learn portion size and easy ways to judge how much you ate. There’s a huge amount of difference in calories based on the size of the serving. Knowing portion size is important.

For more information, contact us today at Prime Fitness