Pray it Off Meeting 5/6/10 The Benefits of A Food Diary or Log WITH VIDEO

The Top 10 Benefits of Recording What You Eat in a Food Diary*
by Jacqueline D. Stanley

1. Allows you to monitor your caloric intake. – Losing weight is a simple equation – take in fewer calories than you expend. Monitoring your caloric intake is the first step in lowering it.

2. Encourages you to focus on your food choices. – More often than not we overeat because we are focusing on something other than what we are eating. Writing down what you eat in a food diary forces you to focus on what you are doing.

3. Provides a record you can share with your health care provider (or PIO Facilitator) Your health care provider can look at your food diary and provide insight and information on what you can do to eat healthier. Also, what you are eating may be impacting your health in other ways.

4. Helps you control the urge to binge. – Knowing you are going to have to write down what you eat can stop you from reaching for the second helping of potato chips.

5. Allows you to track your progress. – A food diary can serve as evidence of how far you have come in this journey. It also feels great to look back and see you are eating better today than you did days, weeks or years ago.

6. Encourages mindful eating. – Writing down what you eat encourages you to think about what you are eating. The more you think, the less and better you eat.

7. Creates a means of evaluating the connection between what you eat and how you feel. – You can use a food diary to examine the circumstances and feelings which trigger overeating. Once you identify the causes you can begin doing something about them.

8. Helps you be sure you are getting enough of each food group. -- It is important to eat a balanced diet. A food diary can provide clues as to what foods you have been neglecting and need to add to your diet.

9. Assists you in acknowledging the reality of how much you eat. – Keeping a food diary will help you confront the truth about how much you eat. Once you stop kidding yourself about how much you eat, you can begin making the necessary changes.

10. Reinforces your commitment to achieving and maintaining a healthy weight. – Each time you make an entry in your food diary you are expressing your intention and desire to do what needs to be done in order to live well.



What You Should Write in Your Food Diary** by Jody Morse

You have probably been told time and time again how important it is for you to keep a food diary if you were interested in losing some weight. Although you may have thought about keeping one, you might have not known what you should write inside it. Here, we will take a much closer look at some of the many things that you should be sure to write inside your food diary in order to help you better understand your own eating habits as a key to losing weight. When used properly, a food diary can be a very effective key to weight loss.

The Foods You Ate And Their Calories

The first thing that you will want to write down in any food diary is the foods which you have consumed, as well as the amount of calories that you have consumed. If you cannot determine exactly how many calories the food that you have eaten have, you should take a good guess. You should also be sure to include anything which you may have added to your foods, such as salt or sugar. Knowing everything which you have eaten for the day is very important, so you should not forget to write down anything. While you are often told that the main key to losing weight is understanding how many calories you eat each day, the truth is that this not necessarily the case. There are several other things which you will need to understand, along with the amount of calories from the foods that you have eaten.

How The Foods Made You Feel Afterwards

Next, it is important to write down how the foods made you feel after you ate them. For example, did the foods make you feel full and satisfied or did they leave you hungry and with stomach pains later on? Getting a good idea of what types of reactions these foods had on your body is a main key to understanding what you might want to eat later on in your diet. Chances are that you may want to avoid anything which does not satisfy you or bothers you and instead eat the foods which seemed to satisfy you the most.

Why You Decided To Eat The Foods

If you ate foods which were not during meals but were instead snacks, you may want to think about writing down why you ate them. Were you feeling hungry? Or perhaps you were feeling depressed or bored. Having a good idea of why you eat when you do is a main key to beating any cravings that you may have. It is also a good idea to consider what types of foods you eat during certain moods. For example, do you only eat candy bars or potato chips when you are feeling depressed? You might want to try to eat baby carrots or celery sticks when you are feeling this way. It is safe to say that you will not be able to change or beat your cravings until you understand why you have them.

If you are interested in losing weight, it is important to realize that there is more for you to understand than simply the amount of calories that you are taking in from the foods that you consume. Understanding how the foods you eat make you feel afterwards, as well as why you decided to eat them in the first place, is a main key to losing weight.

*http://www.weightlossmoms.com/nutrition/the-top-10-benefits-of-recording-what-you-eat-in-a-food-diary.html
**http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/284201/what_you_should_write_in_your_food.html?cat=51
Photo: http://alwaysthefriendneverthegf.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/weight-watchers-food-journal.jpg