Diet affects every aspect of health, from your energy level to how quickly you recover from illness (or sometimes even whether or not you get sick). If you’re desperate to lose weight, diet is crucial. The right diet choices ensure that you maintain muscle while losing fat and that you don’t increase your risk of preventable diseases. So what does this have to do with using a printable food diary?
Despite the importance of daily food choices, very few people can answer questions about calories, grams of fat, fiber, carbs and other important information about their diet and meal choices. The biggest reason for this is probably that they just don’t know where to find the information in the first place or how to keep track of it in an easy way.
One excellent choice is to use a printable food diary. While there are food diaries online, it’s important to have one that you can print out since you may not eat every meal where you have easy access to the Internet. It’s also easy to transfer information from your printable food diary to one online.
Trends that you want to look for include total calorie consumption, intake of different types of fats and the various nutrients that you get from each meal. As you see the trends start to emerge, keep two things in mind. First you want to limit your intake of the unhealthy stuff, like saturated fat and cholesterol. Second, you want to make sure you’re getting plenty of the good stuff, like iron, B vitamins, omega-3 fatty acids, etc.
Tracking your diet with a printable food diary is only the first step. Don’t forget that good diet choices should be combined with regular exercise. Give your body and your heart something to do with all that metabolized food. The combination good diet and regular exercise will be sure to boost your energy level and stave off the diseases that have been shown to follow poor diet choices.
The biggest challenge to getting benefit from a printable food diary is probably just printing one out and getting started. Here’s the easiest way to get started. Create a new document and at the top of the page put the following headings
Date
Meal (B=breakfast, L=lunch, D=dinner, S=snack)
Food description
Calories
Fat (grams)
Carbs
Fiber (grams)
Then add blank lines below for each entry in your daily food diary. Remember, the key is simplicity, not complexity. The easier it is to do, the more likely you are to do it. Not to mention that just tracking those details about each meal gives you a ton of information to use when making changes to your diet. Print it out and start tracking with your next meal.