How to keep it?
Many modern people consider the necessity of keeping a food diary. A food diary is a place where all meals throughout the day are recorded, noting both the time of eating and the quantity and types of products. Nowadays, there are numerous ways to keep such a diary, ranging from convenient smartphone apps to special paper diaries or even simple notes in a notebook or computer document.
Why keep a food diary
A food diary is one of the most convenient and useful tools for both a professional dietitian and a person who wants to adjust their weight, overcome food addiction, or other eating-related disorders. Keeping a food diary is also extremely beneficial for many other diseases and pathologies, as many aspects of human life depend on food intake. For example, a food diary will be useful for people with diabetes and for perfectly healthy athletes who want to achieve the best results from their training. It equally helps monitor a child's proper nutrition and allows an elderly person to maintain their health.
But why can the simple recording of meals, their timing, types, and amounts of consumed food help? Primarily because keeping a diary is already the first step towards improving your diet, allowing you to analyse it and make adjustments. Very often, the mere fact of keeping a diary leads to positive results for those intending to correct their diet. They begin to understand how much food they consume, which products make up a significant part of their diet, and how many meals occur throughout the day.
An important fact – a food diary allows you to optimise not only your diet! Most people who keep food diaries also note that they have become better at managing finances and avoiding unnecessary expenses. Additionally, many people using a food diary note that they have more free time – as they better plan the time spent on cooking, eating, and purchasing products!
How to properly keep a food diary?
In fact, starting a food diary is very simple, and there are no complexities or overly detailed recommendations for this. The most important thing is to record every meal, detailing the time of eating and all consumed products.
Subsequently, based on this information, more detailed calculations can be made regarding the content of consumed dishes, decisions about dietary behaviour adjustments can be made, or consultations with a dietitian can be sought to create the most optimal eating schedule and menu to achieve desired results.
There are also several general recommendations to simplify keeping a food diary:
- Make it a habit to record all meals immediately. During the day, you might forget about an extra cup of coffee or a poppy seed bun. But if you get used to instantly recording information in your food diary, you won't miss any detail!
- Record approximate information about consumed dishes in your diary. There's no need to calculate the weight of each portion down to the gram. Moreover, information about the mass and composition of many ready-made dishes is already provided by manufacturers!
- Regularly analyse the diary. Try to do this at least once a week. Determine which products you consume more frequently and which less so, and consider replacing undesirable products with more beneficial ones.
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