Keep a Food Diary

Keeping a food diary or an eating journal is a proven web loss tool. Here's how to do it.

Why Keep a Food Journal?

Because we lie to ourselves about what we eat. We forget what we've eaten. Because keeping a food diary will force you to be fully accountable for what you eat. It will also stop you from eating, if only sometimes. Getting the little food log out to write down a hard candy you took from a co-workers candy jar is enough of a hassle that if you get really strict about writing every single thing you eat down, you will actually stop eating some things just because you do not want to write them down. Seriously -- it will happen.

Depending on how you keep your journal/log/diary, it will also show you what your eating patterns are. To see this, you need to record more than what you eat -- you need to also record how hungry you are, and what your mood is, and what time it is when you ate. Record your hunger on a scale of 1 to 10 (one being not hungry at all, not even a little, and 10 being "if you do not give me that food I will kill you right now"). Record your mood as how you are feeling emotionally and physically. You have to do better than saying you're "good" for the emtional part. Are you sad, anxious, frustrated, grateful, or giddy? For the physical, include any aches or pains like headaches or shoulder aches, or include your energy level. Different people track different things.

If you have been trying to lose weight without success, or if you are an emotional eater, keeping a food log with hunger levels and emotional and physical states will give you a window into how you work that will blow you away. It will reveal patterns you could never see before. For many people it is the key that unlocks how to really lose weight. Check out Kathleen DesMaisons's book, Your Last Diet , for a detailed discussion of food logs.

How to Keep a Food Diary

There are a lot of ways to keep a food diary, or an eating journal, or a weight loss log -- whatever you want to call it. You can go digital and track what you eat online through sites like MyFoodDairy and or FitDay.com. I like using websites to track my weight loss (seeing my weight go down on a slick graph makes me happy), but to actually track what I eat, there's no way I'm logging in to a site to record my afternoon snack, much less the half of a danish I split with a friend an hour before dinner.

The alternative to an online journal is, of course, a written one. If you have ever been in Debtor's Anonymous and had to track your spending, you'll know that for most people, keeping these kinds of logs is actually done on a small pad of paper or a notebook that you can easily tuck into a pocket and pull out at a moment's notice. I love the tiny moleskine hardcover black notebooks -- the ones that are a bit bigger than a credit card. They hold up well, and are easy to write on while you are standing or walking.

A typical day's entry might look like this:

What When Felt Energy

standard breakfast (which you would know to mean 1/3 cup oatmeal, handful sliced almonds, handful raisins) 6:20am Cranky and rushed want to sleep

full mug black coffee 6:40 better, optimistic medium

apple & 1/2 cup trail mix 9am critical tense

salad with 2 boiled eggs, apple 12 competent medium high, in flow

bag of doritoes 1pm like i deserve it little low, wobbly

apple & mug of coffee 3pm contemplative like a nap

ham and cheese sandwich from whole foods 6pm anxious freakin hungry!

bowl of strawberries with cup yogurt 8:30 glad to be home shoulders sore, cold

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