6 REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD BE KEEPING A FOOD DIARY
Food diaries! One of the many current buzzwords around dieting and fitness today! What is a food diary? Why should I keep one? Do I need to keep one? These are all extremely good questions which the online personal trainers at Base.Training will try to answer in this blog, and hopefully shed some light on this whole thing for you too so that you can answer those questions for yourself.
So first off, what exactly is a food diary? A food diary is a useful tool in helping you understand your eating habits and patterns, and helps you identify foods that are good, and not-so-good, that you eat on a regular basis.
So now that you know what a food diary is, why should you keep one? Well, after conducting a weight loss study including nearly 1,700 participants, those clever folks over at Harvard University discovered that those who kept food diaries lost twice as much weight compared to those who kept no record throughout the study. Therefore, if you want to lose weight then keeping a food diary is the perfect way to do that, that is a fact! However, I’m sure you are still wondering how that is possible by simply writing down what you eat, aren’t you? Well, here is our list of reasons why we think collecting a food diary is useful and why it contributes successfully to weight loss:
1. It makes you more aware of what you are actually consuming
This point relates to the nutrient information of food in regards to your recommended daily allowances. So you have had a very tough day, and have been craving pizza all day. As a result you decide to swing by Domino’s on the way home and grab a 12” pepperoni pizza, mmmmmm sounds delicious right? Well, just one of those slices will cost you 208 calories of your daily allowance. Now I know this doesn’t sound like much, but multiply that by the number of slices in the pizza, which is 8, and you have potentially consumed 1664 calories. You log this in your food diary and you very quickly realise that is over half your recommended daily allowance for both males and females alike. So the next time you have a desperate craving for pizza, you pop down to the local supermarket instead and grab a pepperoni pizza that you can cook at home. You consume the entire pizza, satisfying your craving for pizza, and very quickly realise after looking and the box and noting down the nutritional information about the pizza in your diary that that whole 12” pizza was only 422 calories, just less than a quarter of your daily allowance for females and less than fifth of your daily allowance for males. For future reference you now know that you can treat yourself pizza, whilst still consuming plenty of other food throughout the day, and likely not go over your recommended daily allowance so you do not gain weight.
2. It will help you identify what a good portion size really is
Let’s do this one in context. Say for example you eat a large bowl of spaghetti bolognese one day, but after eating it you feel really full up and unable to finish off your food. You write this down in your food diary to say that you were too full and could not finish this specific bowl size. The following week, as you are a creature of habit you have spaghetti bolognese on the same day, but this time after consulting your food diary, you serve yourself a smaller bowl knowing that you couldn’t finish the previous bowl size. However this time, you are able to finish all the food and are happily satisfied after consuming the meal. You write this down in your food diary so that you now know this is a suitable portion size for you when you eat spaghetti bolognese. Extrapolate that with every meal you eat and you will then have a visual understanding of the amount of food you need to consume per meal to leave you satisfied without wasting food or leaving you still hungry.
3. It can make you conscious of emotional eating
For argument’s sake, let’s say that every Wednesday is your busiest day. Back to back meetings, travelling, you’re in court, weekly deadlines due, whatever the case is, on Wednesday’s you are super busy and this makes you super stressed out. By keeping logged in your diary what emotion you are feeling on that particular day of the week, whatever day that may be, you can then begin to correlate that to your food choices on that particular day also. Whether that be that you consume more fast food on that day, or you decide to go for more sugar based options you can begin to identify patterns in your food choices when feeling that particular emotion. Subsequently, you can now begin to put in place strategies to help you combat that and prevent you from over-indulging when you can expect to feel a certain way. This could be by preparing meals ahead of this day etc to avoid making these poor choices when experiencing those emotions.
4. It can help you track energy levels
Rather than just writing down the food consumed for every meal and/or snack of the day, you can write down what your energy levels are like before and after consuming a particular meal. For example, let’s say you’re working in the office and you’re really struggling to concentrate on your tasks as you’re feeling really lethargic, but lunchtime is just around the corner, so you jot down in your food diary how you are feeling energy levels wise pre-meal consumption. You go to the cafeteria and you see your favourite meal of fish and chips so you order that and indulge on that. You feel satisfied for five minutes and then head back to your office. Once you sit down and the initial satisfaction of the meal wears off you begin to notice that your energy levels are still pretty low and you still cannot concentrate on your work, so you note this down in your diary. The next day you feel exactly the same so you note this down in your diary, but this time when you head to the cafeteria you decide to go for the chicken breast, with broccoli and brown pasta. When you return to your office this time you noticed that your energy levels are far higher than yesterday and you are able to really focus on your work and be extremely productive, so you note this down in your diary. After a period of time you can look back on your food diary and you will see that you have built up a bank of foodstuffs which actually increase your energy levels throughout the day so that during the working week you can be far more energetic and productive.
5. It can help you identify areas for improvement
What we mean by this, are areas that can be improved in our diet and nutrition outside of the other reasons provided a positive reasons for keeping a food diary. Now we know that is confusing in itself, so let’s do this as a practical example. Let’s say that in your food diary, you write down the time at which you are consuming every meal/snack. You know that you are consuming your three main meals per day, but you seem to find yourself hungry at certain points in the day consistently. By listing the times that you consume these meals, over the course of the week you might identify that there is actually six hour window between the meals you consume, which now explains why you are always getting hungry two hours before your next meal. Therefore, we now know that to ensure you continue to perform and function at your optimum level, you either need to eat your main meals closer together, or fit in a snack between your meals as your body requires more energy in the form of calories which we get from food. We now modify your routine so that you consume regular snacks twice a day, three hours before your next meal, so that you no longer experience hunger symptoms throughout the day and are more efficient in the workplace.
6. It can help you identify food intolerances
This could be extremely beneficial to a large number of the general population. By collecting a food diary you can write how you feel pre and post consumption and detail what the food was that you consumed. If before the meal you feel okay but just hungry, you know the portion size of the meal you ate was right for you, but after eating you feel bloated, or later on in the day you are experiencing problems like indigestion, or diarrhoea, or in an extreme case vomiting, and then a week later you eat the same thing and the same symptoms occur, we can start to see a pattern occurring narrowed to one of the food groups that you ate in that particular meal. At this point it would be advisable to go to your GP or get contact AllergyTestUK to find out if you have an allergy to one of these particular food types, allowing you to avoid those in future and prevent any future illness.