Four Ways to Create a Food Journal and Why.

When I work with clients who want to “eat better”, the first assignment I have them do is track their food intake for a seven day period. Ideally this is a seven day period that reflects normal conditions such as being at home and not traveling. There is great power in accountability and when looking to increase awareness to find opportunity, the best way to do this is by journaling. Oftentimes my clients identify things they didn’t realize and I’ve heard the entire gambit from drinking beer every day to no water in a day to way too much rice in a sitting. A couple of different possibilities to get started (listed from easiest to more intense level of effort):

#1 Photo Journal
Snap a photo of each meal, snack and drink. You’ll get an automatic timestamp and can then collage them together to get a broad overview of what’s going down the hatch.

#2 Written Journal
Writing everything down in a bound journal and including the date, time of each nibble and approximate portions (one cup of rice, one glass of wine etc).

#3 Excel/Google Sheet
Same as above but typed up and saved onto your hard drive (or the cloud). This provides an easier high level snapshot at the end of the seven days which may be printed out.

#4 MyFitnessPal
Downloading this free App and inputting all items daily. Certainly the most work while providing the most granularity in terms of calories and macros. The App will ask about portions and it’s pretty easy to find comparable food items to approximate things when going out to eat say spaghetti and meatballs, when searching for that you’ll see a number of similar options, I’d suggest picking one of the possibilities with the green sticker which have been “verified”.

Journaling with timestamps and portions may illuminate opportunities for portion control, reflection on binge eating, analysis of calorie surpluses/deficits, reviewing of macro breakdowns and more.

I worked with Nutrition Coach Nikki Staley to go through my own journey on this with the intention of discovering my optimal caloric intake (within the context of maximizing athletic performance) and she helped me identify the right macro percentages to target. I’m currently consuming 3,000 calories a day with 23% of that compromised of protein, 20% fat and 57% carbohydrates. I would not have been able to fine tune these numbers without Nikki’s coaching and this App. My biggest opportunity was reducing the amount of fat I consumed.

It’s important that every single thing that enters your mouth is tracked, this includes liquids! More importantly that you eat and drink as you normally would so that the post-analysis may be as accurate and beneficial as possible in identifying opportunities for growth. This is not meant to make you feel bad but rather pause for a moment to see if there are changes that could be made that could potentially make you feel better. What patterns do you see? What patterns did you perhaps not realize were there?

The above example was specific to food but journal tracking may apply to a variety of areas including (but not limited to): exercise, spending, meditation and more! Have you gone through a food journaling exercise? What did you learn? If this post inspired you to do so, I’d love to hear what you learn!

Last Updated/Enhanced: March 23, 2017