The food journal has maintained its popularity year after year. Keeping a food diary is a helpful tool for anyone who wants to become more aware of their eating habits and improve them. It also works well if your goal is to identify the cause of any symptoms, like digestive issues or allergies. However, writing everything down may sound quite tiring. In this article, I share my best tips – how to succeed and benefit from keeping a food diary.
What is a Food Journal?
First and foremost, I see the food diary as a tool for you. It helps you track what you eat and drink throughout the day. It’s essential also to note other factors that influence your eating.
- Estimate the amount of food and drink (I don’t recommend weighing, but rather making a rough estimate, such as the number of pieces)
- Where did you have your meal, and what time was it
- Whether you were alone or eating with someone
- How hungry you were before eating (you can use a scale of 1-10)
- How full you were after the meal (the scale works here as well, 1-10)
- How did eating feel?
- Did eating spark any thoughts, emotions, or physical sensations?
Although I primarily see the food diary as something just for you, it can also be helpful when you want to discuss your eating behavior, diet, and food choices with a professional. That’s why, when filling in the diary, it’s important to be as honest as possible and not change your eating habits just because you’re keeping a record (if you do change your eating habits, note that down so you can review the changes with a professional).
You can keep a food diary for as long as you like. Most people keep it for a few weeks, but some continue keeping at least a partial diary for several months. Download the See How You Eat app and join the 14-day food journaling challenge to get extra motivation to create the habit of food journaling.
What Are the Benefits of Keeping Food Journals?
There are several possible benefits of keeping a food diary.
Becoming Aware of Your Food Choices Helps Change Them
Keeping a food journal makes you more aware of your food choices, specific patterns, and behavior. This makes it easier to spot areas that might need change and those that don’t support your well-being. For example, you might notice that you’re going too long between meals, which causes your hunger to become too intense. Or perhaps you’ll realize that you’re not eating enough vegetables, meaning you might not get enough vitamin C or folate in your diet. Many people also worry about getting enough protein and omega-3 fatty acids essential for bodily functions. Food journaling is a method that gives you a good overview of all these situations.
With a food diary journal, you can make more conscious food choices. When you pause and reflect on your eating, you become more aware of what you’re doing and what you’re eating. One of the first steps of mindful eating is pausing and becoming aware.
Want to Affect Your Weight?
Sometimes, there may be situations when you want to try to affect your weight. Since food is one of the factors influencing weight, it may make sense to examine your eating habits through food journaling. The key here is also to pause and become aware. It’s also helpful to add emotional context to your food diary, such as whether you ate when you were tired, sad, or angry. This will help you better understand emotional eating or whether food is used as a reward. Research has shown that pausing and becoming aware of your choices enables you to make better, more well-being-supporting decisions. Note. Calorie counting is not the best way to keep a record of foods.
Looking for a Trigger for Your Symptoms in Your Diet?
Often, a food diary is used to identify foods that may cause symptoms. By keeping track of both your eating and your symptoms, you can figure out what’s causing the issues. This can be especially useful for people with functional digestive problems or allergies. You can also discuss this with a professional who can quickly find the right track based on your food diary.
How to Start Keeping a Food Journal?
Keeping a food diary doesn’t have to be difficult or time-consuming. Here are a few tips on how to get started.
1. Keep your food journal in real-time.
It’s best to write in your diary throughout the day (use your phone’s notes, a notebook, take photos, etc.). If you try to write everything down at night, it’s much harder to remember things like hunger and fullness levels or estimate portion sizes.
The easiest app to help you with food journaling is the See How You Eat app, where you just snap pictures of all your daily meals and look at them at a glance at the end of the day.
2. Be honest in your entries.
You’re keeping the food diary for yourself, so write down everything honestly:
- What you ate and drank
- The amounts of food and drink
- Where you were and who you were with
- Our thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations related to eating
- How hungry you were and how full you felt (you can use a scale of 1-10)
- All those little bites, snacks, or fruit pieces
- Even when you eat while watching TV – write those down, too.
This is especially important if your goal is to determine the cause of an allergy, for example. In other situations, honestly, writing everything down can help you get an accurate picture of your eating habits and consider potential changes.
3. Be precise when filling in your food journal.
Try to be precise when making entries to get the most benefit from the food journal (and possibly for a professional to help you). Write down what you know about your lunch food in the restaurant (for example, the salad dressing was oil-based, the fish soup was creamy, and the drink was skimmed milk). You can estimate the portion size: three potato-sized pieces, two playing card-sized chicken pieces, or a third of the plate is full of salad.
Weighing foods isn’t necessary, but you can do it occasionally to understand portion sizes better.
4. Do you need a food journal app to help document your food?
Almost everyone today has a smartphone. You can use its note function or download a unique food journal app designed for this purpose. Apps for food journaling can be helpful in the monitoring process. Like the super simple and easy-to-use photo food journal See How You Eat app.
There are many apps available. Some provide detailed nutritional information, while others focus on becoming aware of your eating patterns and reminding you about meal timing. Try out a few to see which one works best for you. A free food journal can be affordable but can’t collect the data you might want to monitor.
5. Documenting emotions and sensations is just as important as documenting food.
Although a food journal usually focuses on the foods and drinks you’ve consumed, it’s just as beneficial to write down your feelings of hunger, fullness, and emotions related to eating.
When you note your hunger and fullness levels, you learn a lot about what portion sizes and meal intervals suit you. You can also discover which foods make you most satisfied and which might cause you to eat again soon after.
Observing emotions related to eating can help you address emotional eating. Eating is a very human way of dealing with emotions. Once you identify the emotions you tend to eat in response to, you can address them more sustainably.
Is Keeping a Food Journal Suitable for Everyone?
While keeping a food journal may suit many, it’s not the right choice for everyone. For some people, it may even be harmful.
If you have a history of eating disorders, recognize inflexible eating behavior, or tend to aim for perfectly healthy eating, keeping a food diary may not be a good idea. It could exacerbate the problem and make the situation worse. In this case, the good intentions of keeping a food log can backfire.
An eating diary can increase food judgment and rigidity in your relationship with food. Feelings of shame and guilt may also increase. It can, therefore, trigger eating behavior disorders.
It’s also possible to get caught up in calorie counting or closely tracking nutrients. But food is always more than just energy and nutrients. Simply focusing on these aspects in the long term will not improve your well-being.
So, if you identify with any of these patterns, it’s better to skip the meal journaling and focus, for example, on learning mindful eating instead.
In Conclusion
A food log is often used to investigate one’s eating habits. Including other information in the journal is also helpful since it provides good insight into your relationship with food. Food is not just about calories and nutrients; it contains emotions and social situations. A food journal is invaluable if you want to become aware of these aspects. You can also search for triggers like allergies or digestive issues. Try the tips you’ve received in this article and enjoy the benefits a food diary can bring you!
One more thing
Remember, there’s no right or wrong way to keep a food diary. Experiment and find the method that works for you. Whether you prefer traditional pen and paper or want an easy-to-use mobile app, remember that the aim of food diary journal is for you and your insights. It’s your opportunity for change.
Enjoyable meal-tracking moments.
Marika Venäläinen
Registered Dietitian Nutritionist (RDN)