I believe one of the most useful tools in the quest for health and wellness is the food diary. There are many ways you can keep track of what you eat (and drink). Remember that unless it is water, it counts for something. Sometimes we are not very conscious of what we are eating. Especially if we are busy or it is a habit, for example you cut the crust off of the sandwich for the kids and automatically eat it. That counts. Bites of things count. If you don’t eat the whole dish of ice cream but you have a few bites that counts.
So, you need to decide what your goal is, then you can decide how you want to keep track. You can simply write down everything you eat or you can keep track of what you eat AND how much. You can include calories, you can include amount of fat, you can include amount of protein. Your goal will assist you in deciding how much information you want to keep track of.
Now-a-days there are hundreds of options to keep track of what you ingest. There are online food diaries, or digital diaries, if you have an iPhone there are numerous applications that can help you. Food Diaries (of food logs) run from really easy to difficult. It depends on what you want to keep track of. I used to use one that I really liked because it was simply. But they changed it and made it difficult, so I am not going to even bother mentioning it here. There are plenty of free ones out there so you don’t need to pay a sign-up fee or a monthly fee. Once you decide what you want to keep track of I am sure you can find one that will do exactly that. You might want to keep in mind a few things, even if you don’t want to keep track of a certain thing now you might want to in the future so it might be nice if the one you use can keep track of multiple things (vitamins, minerals, etc.). It is really important to use one that allows you to customize your food. I found that most of the ones I looked at have a ton of Fast Food already programmed in, but I don’t eat fast food, so I had to input most of my food, then once I did that I could just click on the custom entry whenever I ate it.
Try it. Even if at first you just write down what you eat. It is a GREAT tool. Try it and you will see.
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