Food Diary Tips
Filling in a food diary is an excellent tool for losing weight. It makes you accountable for your actions and allows you to analyse your week areas and make improvements. Before diving in the deep end with a food diary, I want to share my top tips to making it as effective as possible.
Make it easy for yourself – Don’t make a complicated spreadsheet for logging food that involves a lot of effort or time. Keep it simple. Use apps such as My Fitness Pal, type in the notes section on your phone, keep a sheet of A4 on the fridge or fill it in on the DackAttack app. By making the process easier, you are much more likely to fill it in
Set a reminder – Instead of relying on memory, try and fill it in at least once or day. Set a reminder on your phone and do it just after your last meal of the day. I can’t remember what I had for breakfast last Tuesday and I don’t expect you to remember either.
Be as accurate as you can – Try and give rough portion sizes. I don’t want you counting out the number of raisins you ate or the weight of the apple. Use your hand as a measuring tool. A handful of pasta, a fist sized orange or a thumb sized chunk of butter. This will give me a rough idea of the number of calories consumed and give us a baseline to work from.
Be honest – If you only put the foods that believe are ‘healthy’ and skip over that KFC bucket and ice cream, it becomes impossible to calculate your calorie baseline. If you have issues with certain foods, it is great to find ways in overcoming these challenges and working to fix them.
Carry it out for a full week – A week long food diary (that’s 7 days, not 5) give us the ability to highlight issues on certain days. It’s very common for people to have a good diet most of the week, to then binge or ‘treat’ themselves at the weekend. By carrying out the food diary for the full week you will be able to see these issues and tackling them.
Bear these 5 points in mind when filling in your food diary to provide and accurate picture. This will help build an accurate plan to ensure you will smash your results.
The brains, brawn and beauty of Dackattack (basically it’s just me). A personal trainer with a private gym in Norwich, dedicated to giving out simple, actionable advice that will give you outstanding results.
