Tracking Your Food: The Right Way To Do It

By Elois Tarvin


When you first start your diet one of many things you will learn right away is that maintaining a food journal is very helpful. Keeping your meal journal not only helps you see clearly what you are eating, it helps you see what you are not eating. For example, after retaining a food journal for a few days, you might see that you are not taking in very many vegetables but that you are consuming lots of sugar and bad carbohydrates. Having it all written down may help you determine the elements of your diet that need to change as well as how much exercise you need to get to make sure that you burn enough calories to keep your waistline in check.

But what if you've been writing everything down and still aren't losing weight? You can track your food the right way or the incorrect way. There is much more to food journaling than creating an index of what you eat during the day. You need to write down other important pieces of information as well. Here are a number of the elements you need to do to be more effective at food tracking.

Be as precise as possible get whenever you record the things you eat. You need to do more than just write down "salad" into your food journal. You need to record each of the components within that salad as well as the type of dressing on it. You must also record how much of the foods you are eating. "Cereal" is not beneficial, although "one cup Shredded Wheat" can be. It is very important to understand that the larger your servings, the more calories you will be eating so you need to know just how much of every thing you actually eat so that you can figure out how many calories you will need to work off.

Record the time of morning that you eat items. This will allow you to find out precisely what times of day you feel the most hungry, when you usually reach for snacks and then you can learn how to deal with those times. You'll observe, for example, that although you eat lunch at the identical time every day, you also--without fail--start to snack as little as an hour later, every day. This will even help you identify the times when you start to eat simply to give yourself something to do. This is important simply because, once they are identified, you can find other ways to fill those moments than with unhealthy foods.



What kind of spirits are you in when you eat? Write it down! This could show you whether or not you use food to solve emotional issues. It will even identify the foods you decide on when you are in certain moods. Many people will reach for junk foods whenever we are disappointed, angry or depressed and will be more likely to choose healthier options when we are happy or content. Paying attention to what you reach for when you are upset will help you stock similar but more healthy items in your house for when you need a snack-you could also begin talking to someone to figure out why you cure moods with food (if that is something that you actually do).




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