Why You Should Keep A Food Journal
What is a food journal?
A food journal is exactly what it sounds like, a journal for the food you eat. However, what most probably don’t know is that it’s much more than a diary for your yogurt and fruit. It can help you understand your eating habits and patterns, and help you identify the foods you eat on a regular basis.
Keeping a food journal helps to make you more aware of your choices and can encourage you to be more mindful of not only what you are eating, but also how, why, and when you’re eating. Food journaling can often shed light on your patterns of eating as well. It can show you when you skip meals, if you’re overeating at night, or if you’re mindlessly snacking throughout the day.
Food journaling can also help identify certain triggers of unhealthy eating you might have. Are you grabbing that vending machine cookie or bag of chips when feeling stressed or bored at work? Do you eat a late night bowl of ice cream because you’re feeling lonely? You may even notice that you are eating more food than you need, but are not getting enough nutrition.
What do food journals keep track of?
The information you choose to keep track of in your journal depends on the challenge you are tackling. It can be trying to lose a few pounds, identifying potential food sensitivities, tracking adequate nutrition or even beginning to manage an eating disorder like emotional eating. Whatever the motivating factor, there are a few key areas to focus in order to get the most out of your food journaling experience.
Food
While this may seem like the most obvious, it is also the most important. The key is to be truly honest and not just record the healthy foods. Being honest helps makes journaling more effective as a learning tool to create healthier habits that will promote your overall health and well-being.
time
Time can help to identify your pattern of eating throughout the day. If you note that you’re skipping meals or going too long without eating, this may help you realize why you’ve been unhealthily eating later in the day or night. Noting the time of day can help you to establish more balanced eating strategies to improve your eating habits.
Hunger level
This is a valuable factor that allows greater awareness of why you are eating and how much you are eating. Many people eat outside of true physical hunger and eat beyond feeling satiated. So this strategy can be especially useful to those who suffer from eating disorders like binge eating, emotional eating or compulsive eating.
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Positives of food journaling
Food journaling can be a positive experience that can help you to identify any negative eating habits that you might want to change. While some may find the task of keeping a food journal daunting, the benefits for most heavily out weigh keeping track of everything you eat.
The following are merely a handful of the positive aspects of food journaling:
It can help you remember what you have eaten that day.
You can see where you can improve if you are trying to achieve a goal.
It will let you see if you are eating too much or not enough.
It can help you realize if you are eating out of boredom rather than hunger.
What is mindful eating?
Mindful eating is maintaining an in the moment awareness of the food and drink you put into your body. It involves observing how the food makes you feel and the signals your body sends about taste, satisfaction, and fullness. Mindful eating requires you to simply acknowledge and accept rather than judge the feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations you observe.
Mindful eating isn’t about being perfect, always eating the right things, or never allowing yourself to eat on-the-go again. And it’s not about establishing strict rules for how many calories you can eat or which foods you have to include or avoid in your diet. Rather, it’s about focusing all your senses and being present as you shop for, cook, serve, and eat your food.
How it ties into food journaling
Mindfulness has a great influence on how much you eat, how you feel when you eat and when you choose to eat. It is because of this influence that food journaling is often seen as a method for mindful eating. Being mindful of how you feel before and after you eat can help identify the true reasons why you eat. You can learn what triggers your unhealthy eating patterns like grabbing a bag of chips because you’re stressed.
3 reasons why you should keep a food journal
Food journaling can be a really great tool to help you achieve your goals, and not be from a place of punishment or judgement. It helps to uproot and reflect back what you’re looking for in terms of accountability, responsibility, and even support. All it takes is viewing it the right way.
1.It’s a conversation, not an assessment
You can use a food journal as an opportunity to better understand the context of your eating and your relationship to food. And through understand your eating, you will be less likely to judge yourself or over assess your relationship to food. Sometimes you can even find that within the context of your eating, there are subtle changes you can make to your eating habits, while still eating the way you want.
2.It gives you good feedback
It’s an opportunity that as you establish new habits, you can get feedback from the food journal you’re keeping. This feedback allows you to see how these new habits are working for you and if you need to adjust them, or if they’re working perfectly for you.
3.It keeps you accountable to your goals
By using a food journal, you can help to keep yourself accountable to your eating and wellness goals. This information you write in your food journal, like what you’re eating and how you’re eating, helps to identify your motivations for eating. These motivations could be in relation to underlying emotional issues, and uncovering them through your food journaling could be the first step to holding yourself accountable.
Lifestyles that would benefit from food journaling
While anyone can benefit from food journaling, there are certain lifestyles that should be food journaling daily. Once you recognize that you fall within one of these lifestyles, you can begin your food journaling experience and be one step closer to a healthy lifestyle. However if you don’t relate with one of these lifestyles, you might find that you could still benefit from keeping a food journal.
Lack of nutrition
Those who lack proper nutrition are often eating too much of one food group, and not enough of the ones meant to give your body the vitamins and minerals it needs. They may not even realize they’re depriving their body. They may even just be eating too many processed foods, and not enough fruits and vegetables. Those who lack proper nutrition could also not be eating enough calories, which in turn could lead to a variety of other health and wellness issues.
what can be done
Keeping a food diary will allow you to analyze what foods you are not eating enough of, or which ones you’re eating too much. It can also show whether you are eating enough of each food group or not. If your food diary consists of mainly carbohydrates and proteins, then you’re not getting the vitamins you need from fruits and vegetables.
Mindless eaters
Those who mindlessly eat can often find themselves eating in the car commuting to work, at the desk in front of a computer screen, or on the couch watching TV. They typically eat by shoveling their food down regardless of whether they’re still hungry or not. Mindless eaters often eat for reasons other than hunger, like satisfying emotional needs, relieving stress, or coping with emotions such as sadness, anxiety, loneliness, or boredom.
what can be done
Try eating your meals with all your attention rather than on auto pilot. This means not eating while you’re reading, looking at your phone, watching TV, or planning what you’ll do later. Try practicing mindful eating for short, five-minute periods at first and gradually build up from there. You can also practice mindful eating when you’re making your shopping list too.
Fatigue prone
Those who are prone to fatigue, or who are constantly feeling foggy, typically find themselves feeling tired no matter what. They might be eating large meals throughout the day, and then soon after find themselves in a type of food coma which leads to them feeling fatigued. Those who are fatigue prone may also be eating too many processed foods too often, and not giving their body the fuel it needs to be energized.
what can be done
By writing down how you feel after you eat, you will be able to more closely identify which food cause you to feel more fatigued. You may find that having a green salad with quinoa and vegetables for lunch leaves you feeling energized, while heated up processed foods make you feel more sluggish. After enough entries, you’ll be able to tailor your meals to help you feel less fatigued.
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Try keeping a food journal for a couple weeks and see what you learn. Using it as a learning tool to observe your portions, habits, and the types of foods you eat will help you cultivate more mindfulness.
Extra tips for keeping a food journal
When you are logging your food, try asking yourself why you’re eating. If it’s anything other than you’re hungry, write it down.
Make note of the time of day you are eating, and how many times a day you’re eating.
It’s often best to keep your food thoughts short and sweet, unless you want to get more into the details of how you are feeling and why you chose the food you did for future reference.
