Food Journal to Get and Keep Your Eating on Track

Food journaling is a great tool to help you get and keep your eating on a healthy, supportive track. Keeping a food journal can help you discover your eating patterns, increase self-awareness and understanding of your choices, all which can lead to you treating yourself and your body better.
Too often we overeat or make less supportive choices simply because we are focusing on other things…other than what we are eating. Maybe we are in a rush, have the TV on, or are just mindlessly munching on the bread basket at dinner…well just because it is there…
We also eat for emotional reasons at times - out of happiness, sadness, boredom, anger, loneliness, frustration etc... Who at one time or another hasn’t grabbed for their favorite “comfort food” at the end of a rough day or gone out for dessert to celebrate a special occasion etc... If we only ate because we were truly hungry, very few of us would have weight concerns.
Keeping a food journal with an accurate track of when, where, how much, and how you felt when you did eat encourages you to focus and think about what you are doing and why. And, the more mindful you are, the better you are likely to eat and treat your body.
For emotional eating, a food journal helps you examine the connection between what you eat and how you feel. You can use a food journal to look at the circumstances and feelings that trigger you to overeat. Once you are able to identify the causes you can begin doing something different to deal with them. For instance, going for a walk, calling a friend, or reading a magazine are healthy coping tools to replace the temporary substitute of food.
A food journal also helps you make sure you are eating a well-balanced diet, raising awareness of which foods you need to add or reduce in your diet, as well as drawing your attention to how certain foods make you feel physically. For instance, I discovered that every time I drank soda, my stomach felt bloated and uncomfortable, so I have replaced it with water, tea or coffee and have not looked back since because these choices do not make my body feel icky.
Keeping a food journal can also help you learn to eat proper portion sizes. For instance, your morning cereal habit could actually be sabotaging your diet if your daily serving size (filling your favorite bowl to the top) is really 2 or 3 times the amount of the serving size found on the nutritional label. Once you become aware of how much you are really serving yourself, you can begin modifying where there needs to be change.
Last but not least, keeping a food journal reinforces your desire and commitment to achieve and maintain a healthy weight, body, and lifestyle that you deserve.