Food Diary Analysis

 

The dreaded food diary is always recommended by fitness professionals but seldom kept up for any length of time. One of the reasons for this is that the diary does not usually lie! It is a cold hard look at what you are eating. I have lost count at the number of times that a client has said to me after the first week of tracking the intake of their food that they had a really bad week. They assure me that they never usually eat that badly. Normally this is not the case it just means that they have never recorded their food intake before.

 

 

1. Let’s cut to the chase what good does a diary do? It tells you what you already know which is that your nutrition is not good. Woo hoo did we really need a diary to tell us this! No and therein lies the problem it tells us basically what we already knew.
2. One of the aims of it though should be to find out the regularity of your meal times. Are you missing meals or are you snacking too much. I also get people to fill out a diary just to find out what they eat and then make a meal plan from that. It’s hard enough to make changes without having to become a part time chef as well!
3. Your goal then should be to have regular meals. My preferred is 6 a day so that’s 3 snacks and your main breakfast, lunch and dinner. So many meals you cry yes that’s true but you have to try and stick to the meal times that you set out. So for example 9am for breakfast so stick to that time if you can. What happens if you miss a meal time just eat and then stick to the next mealtime but have something smaller then for the next one and then you are back on track. This is important for binge eaters who will really struggle to go without food longer than 3 hours especially later in the evening

4. So you set your mealtimes and see can you stick to them. If you find that you are eating in between those meal times then it’s very possible that you have a comfort eating problem but hey don’t freak out that’s good and valuable information to know. If this is the case you will have to work on your emotional intelligence and to break that down further your ability to regulate your emotions.

 Now it is time to look at a sample diary so that I can give you some idea of what to look for.

• You can see from the diary that the meal times that the person is eating at are erratic. As I already mentioned I would strongly advise this person to try and eat at roughly the same times every day. If they decide to eat outside of those times then it is more than likely comfort eating. They can then look at the reasons for comfort eating and try and tackle them.
• Do not under any circumstances eat low fat or low quality treats. Get the most expensive or the ones that you truly enjoy the most and have small amounts. Better to be satisfied rather than saying I did not really enjoy that so I am going to have another better treat.
• You can see that there is little fruit been eaten so that is something to improve upon as well. Aiming to get a least one portion of fruit daily would be a good realistic goal.
• Sometimes it is best for the person to make the suggested changes themselves as they know what is realistic for them. It is important not to make drastic changes or they will not be maintainable in the long term.

The most important thing is not to use the diary as a stick to beat yourself over the head with. If you do this you will quickly give up. It is to be used to give you important information that you can then use to make improvements in your nutritional intake. If you are trying to lose weight then it will show you when you are comfort eating. If you are trying to build muscle it will show you wether you are getting enough protein for your muscles. It can also show you wether you are eating regular meals. So to sum up if used correctly a food diary can very useful so why not give it a go and see what you learn!