I Kept A Food Journal For 30 Days. This Is What Happened.

Keep a food journal to track weight lossIf you’ve ever had one of those weeks where you step on the scale and the number immediately makes you play a reel of meals in your mind, you’ll appreciate what happened when I kept a food journal.

When your weight stays the same, or even goes up, along your weight loss journey, you immediately start to evaluate what you did over the past several days. Glass of wine…that turned into three, dinner out, coffee drink through a drive-thru window…and suddenly the scale makes more sense. Keeping a food journal may not sound like a riveting way to reach a healthy weight, but these three reasons explain why it works.

Food Journal And A Moment Of Pause

The idea of a food journal is to write down the food before you eat it. Waiting until the end of the day and jotting down everything you ate defeats the purpose. When you take out your journal to pencil in what you’re about to eat or drink, it gives you time to consider whether you’re making the best choice.

Track The Tempting Moments

When you write down your meals and snacks, make a note of the time of day. After you track the food for the first week, go back and review where you faced the biggest challenges. Evening snacks? Beer and bar foods over the weekend? Your journal will help you identify the times of day or days of the week that present the biggest challenge so you can plan ahead to take on those obstacles the next week.

Awareness Of Eating Out

After tracking my food for a month, I discovered I was dining out much more than I realized. Even when we make healthy choices at a restaurant, we never really know how the food is prepared or what unknown ingredients are in the finished product. Review your food journal. How many times do you dine out each week? Your goal should be no more than twice weekly as you try to lose weight.

With today’s technology, it’s easy to keep a food journal. Download an app and start documenting everything that goes in your mouth. A few of our favorite apps are Rise Up, Calorific, and See How You Eat.