Food Journal: Why Writing it Down is the Right Thing

I have always been told to keep a food journal and resisted doing so.  Of course, every time I wrote down what I ate, I lost weight.  Still, all the instructions for keeping a journal were SO complicated.

Usual instructions were to write down everything I ate, how much, where I ate it and my feelings and I was supposed to do this throughout the day.

This alone was daunting  but I tried anyway. First, I thought it would be easier to use electronic journals on line but these took way too much time to enter in my food. Using  my own spreadsheet so that I could copy and paste foods that usually ate  was also time expensive. Nor did I find useful the special low carb diet journal which included numerous charts and suggestions but wasn’t flexible enough for my needs.

What I really needed was an inexpensive system that let me plan what I was going to eat for the day and know what foods I was including from my lists of limited foods. Voila, the simple spiral bound journal.  Each morning,  it takes 5 minutes to write down my day’s foods and highlight foods that I can have a small amount each day (green highlighter) and foods that I am limited to two choices/day (red highlighter).

I also include my weight and waist measurement. Yes, I know. We are not supposed to weigh ourselves each day.  But it works for me.

It makes me feel good to write down my exercise too.

Finally,  I have been including the number of hours I sleep because lack of sleep causes overeating.

It’s a simple system and it works for me. And maybe that’s just enough to lose weight.