Dear Diary...

Katie and I were just talking about how hard it is to keep a food diary. There are a lot of apps now that will keep a record of what you eat electronically, but there's always a glitch. If you eat a lot of homemade food like I do it's a lot of work just to have to figure out the ingredients, the amount you use, what the portion size actually is, etc. And let's not even think about the family secret recipe where you just throw stuff in without thinking about number of teaspoons of paprika you used. It's a time consuming task and many of us simply stop keeping track after a few days. But as much as we would like to declare that a food diary is not a necessary factor in weight loss, it's not true. Keeping track of everything you eat can serve as a wake-up call. Who knew that you weren't eating the appropriate amount of essential fats and protein while you were completely over-indulging in refined grains over whole grains? And what kind of fat were you eating anyway? Saturated fat? Trans fat? Monounsaturated fat? Or polyunsaturated fat? Are you consuming too much sodium perhaps? There are so many factors that we have to consider in order to keep good track of our nutrition. It's almost impossible to do so unless we provide ourselves with a complete analysis of what we eat daily. Once we get a good balance of the essential food  groups, sure we can stop using a daily food diary and check up on it once in a while. But if we're amateurs at estimating how much fruits and veggies we ate compared to the amount of bread and crackers, then a food diary will help us learn to do so. 

"But what about all the time it takes to log in the food?" Well, think about all the time you waste everyday. Maybe it comes in the form of watching cat videos on YouTube. How about the amount of time you watch TV commercials instead of the actual show itself? What about when you're waiting for an appointment? The point is, we actually have plenty of time to log in the food we eat everyday. It's just a matter of using our time wisely. If we add up all those little minutes we waste, we may end up with a half-hour, an hour, or several hours. That's more than enough time to create a meal in your food tracker or add a new recipe. And once it's in there you can save it and use it for next time. These apps are built so that overtime you'll already have that special family recipe and other homemade delicacies at your fingertips. What may take 15 minutes now to log will only take 5 seconds next time. 

Go ahead then. Download a food tracker. Practice making a habit of logging in food. They say it takes 21 days to create a habit. I'm not saying that's true (I haven't exactly researched the validity of that statement), but consistency is key. Try to get a couple of food logging streaks, making each one longer. My favorite food tracker app is the MyFitnessPal app. It has a food logging streak counter, a bar code scanner for quick logging, a wide variety of foods, a nutrition chart to show the percentage of protein, carb, and fat you're taking in, and so much more. There are also other food trackers, but so far I haven't found one that I liked as much as MyFitnessPal. 

The MyFitnessPal is an example of a handy electronic food diary