How to keep a food diary
A food diary is a notebook in which you write down everything you eat in a day. In this case, you take into account each calorie eaten, which significantly helps in the process of losing weight.
It is known that proper nutrition is the basis of a beautiful figure and good human health. To learn how to eat right, first of all, you need to understand what should be added to your diet, and what, on the contrary, should be excluded or minimized. For this, in fact, the food diary was invented.
How does a food diary work?
- A food diary will help you easily control what and how much you eat: fats, carbohydrates, proteins and calories;
- At the same time, you will be able to monitor changes in your weight and body parameters in the process of changing your diet;
- A food diary will allow you to get rid of bad habits and gradually get used to the correct diet.
Top reasons why you should keep a food diary
- Slimming. This is the most basic reason people keep a food diary. Excess weight is almost always the result of poor nutrition. However, people are accustomed to leading such a fast-paced lifestyle that they do not always have time to monitor their diet and the amount of food they eat. This is where the food diary comes to the rescue, as it allows you to visually see what and how much you ate at a particular moment, as well as to make an overall picture of your lifestyle.
- Sports nutrition. Any athlete knows how important nutrition is. Large physical activity is always associated with the loss of a large number of calories, therefore, an athlete's calorie intake should be considerable. But not excessive. That is why athletes keep a food diary so that they can keep track of the balance of calories taken and consumed during sports.
- Medical diets and nutrition according to the recommendations of doctors. For certain diseases, doctors recommend their patients to follow special diets, or point out to them those foods that should be strictly prohibited in their diet. Some medical diets involve limiting the amount of carbohydrates / protein / fat / calories. In this case, the food diary allows not only keeping records of quantitative indicators of the daily diet, but also has a psychological effect on the patient, namely, it helps him not to break down.
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Nutrition for mother and child. For a young mother who is breastfeeding her child, a food diary helps to create the right diet and monitor the baby's reaction to certain foods. The food diary helps to monitor the infant's weight and compare it with the mother's diet and calorie intake, which allows you to adjust the diet at any time.
A food diary will help you keep track of your daily diet
Tips for keeping a food diary
- The first tip on how to keep a food diary is that you don't need to have your diary in paper form. If you prefer typing on the keyboard, you can easily create a diary in electronic form. Today there are many sites for losing weight that provide diary forms and even the ability to keep a food diary online.
- Create your own handy diary. Although there are many forms of diary to be found on the Internet today, many of them may seem too complicated for you. Therefore, you can simply split the sheet into vertical columns corresponding to each day of the week (i.e. 7 columns). Divide each of these columns into three more sections and label them as follows: your weight, the number of calories consumed per day, exercise. If you wish, you can add any columns from yourself.
- If you have a good memory, you may well fill out a food diary once a day, for example, before bed. But it is advisable to do this throughout the day, so it is necessary that the diary is always at hand. So, in the morning you can fill in the weight readings and throughout the day the full number of calories consumed. Record in a journal how much time you spent exercising and how many calories you burned while doing it. This will make sure you are not consuming more calories than you are burning.
- Substitute intermediate results. Summarize at the end of each day and week. This will allow you to see how many calories you are getting from food over a certain period of time, how much you burn, and also plan your further diet.
- Look for alternatives. If you find it difficult to count foods in calories, develop your alternative system. For example, there are many automated computer programs that award points for consuming certain foods and for exercising. Such programs can help you greatly simplify the process of keeping a food diary.
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