Diet Food Journal

For those struggling to get their diet on track and keep it on track, the frustration can be huge. This is where a diet food journal could come in handy.

The principle behind a diet food journal is simple. You keep a log of everything you have eaten. In order for this to work, you need to record every bite. For example, if you eat cereal, milk and coffee with sugar for breakfast, be sure to notate how much you ate or drank. Also, don't forget to log that donut you had on your coffee break.

You have to be completely honest in your diet food journal in order for it to work. It is private and will only be read by you, so if you are serious about losing weight there is no point in lying to yourself.

Once you have logged a week's worth of food in your diet food journal, you are in a position to start using this information to its full advantage. First, just reviewing what you ate a week will help you see where you are letting yourself down and how you can improve things by cutting out the bad foods.

Secondly, your diet food journal can help you see if your eating is unbalanced. There are various schools of thought on how you should split your food. The most sensible way seems to be to spread your calories out over three balanced meals and two snacks per day. It is best to eat your last meal before 8 p.m. each evening. This gives your body time to process the food, and is much better than having one huge meal at night.

A diet food journal can also be used to calculate your calorie intake, even if you can only work it out roughly. Again, there are guidelines for how many calories you should be eating in a day. For most dieters, a good goal is to eat no more than 1,500 calories in one day.

For the very overweight, it's best to delete 250 calories at a time until you reach 1,500 calories. This helps your body avoid going into starvation mode.

Once you have lost weight, your diet food journal will be an amazing record of your journey, and remind that you don't want to slip back into old ways.

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