One of the consistent factors in many successful dieters’ stories is that they kept a food diary. Recording everything you eat keeps you accountable to yourself, and is a great way to work out where you might be slipping up.

You can keep your food diary:
On a piece of paper (usually one sheet for each week) In a diary or small notebook In a spreadsheet on your computer Using special software On your mobile or PDA

…and in plenty of other ways! There’s no one perfect way to keep a food diary: what matters is that you log everything you eat.

Starting your food diary

It’s often tempting to wait for a Monday to start keeping a food diary – just like many of us wait for Monday to start a new diet. But why not start today? Waiting for an arbitrary day of the week, or date on the calendar, is just a way of putting off starting to get healthier. Your body doesn’t care what day of the week it is!

Open up a spreadsheet program or word document, and create a simple template with the days of the week down the left hand side (rows) and meals along the top (columns). I usually split the columns like this:
Breakfast Lunch Dinner Snacks

But you should use categories that suit you. Maybe you eat a light dinner (sometimes called “tea” in the UK) with your children, then supper later in the evening, and you might want to divide your day like this:
Breakfast Lunch Dinner (Tea) Supper Snacks

If you drink alcohol, you might want to separate this into its own column, to distinguish alcoholic drinks from meals.

If you’re tracking calories, add a column at the end to record these.

Keeping your food diary

The hardest thing about keeping a food diary is remembering to fill it in! It’s vital to record all the food you eat: once you start letting things slip, you’ll find yourself having more and more “little nibbles” that don’t get written down. Even on days when you’re out and about a lot, try to guesstimate what you ate, and how much of it you had.

Some people find that they like to fill in their food diary once a day, perhaps just before bed. This is a good method for getting into a regular habit, but can be tricky if you eat a lot of little meals or different things during the day, as you may forget what you’ve eaten over the course of the day.

Others fill in foods as soon as they’ve eaten them – or even before eating a meal or snack. This helps you to consider whether you really want to eat that and to have the evidence down in your food log. It works best with a diary or printed record, unless you’re at a computer all day.

Make a commitment to keep a food diary for a set period of time: six weeks is a good target, as you’ll definitely lose some weight over that length of time. Remember that just the act of writing down what you eat will help you make better choices. For a time investment of five or ten minutes per day, keeping a food diary can have a greater effect than your own personal trainer (and it’s free)!

By: Ali Hale

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