Top Benefits of Keeping a Food Journal

I’ve mentioned before about the contradiction of nutrition and fitness advice in the general domain. However when you want to change your body, there is one piece of advice that everybody agrees upon. Regularly keeping a journal of what you eat is the single best nutritional step you can take. The reasons are listed below:

1. Keeps you accountable to yourself
Personal responsibility is the key to achieving a goal in any situation, and health is no different. If you don’t believe that you are in control of your actions then you won’t be. The best way to keep regimented is to write down your food choices. Then when you look back you can honestly assess your diet and make educated choices for the future. A good example being if you find that you keep slipping up at the same time of day, you can plan your life so that you always have good food ready and waiting for you so you don’t have to compromise.

2. Allows others to help you better
Picture this; you’ve been hitting the gym hard four times a week, yet when it comes to measurement day nothing has changed, or the results are not as good as you would like. Where do you go from this? Five times a week? Probably not, you need to tweak your diet. However unless you have a great memory, you won’t be able to tell your trainer everything you ate in the last 14 days. What the trainer needs is a baseline to work from to tell you how to improve. If you just carry on doing what you’re doing the results will carry on in the same fashion!

3. Highlights intolerances
If you feel sluggish or tired periodically or you ever get digestive discomfort there’s a good chance that you are intolerant to a certain type of food. It’s much more common than people think and popular ones are dairy, gluten and eggs. If you keep track of your moods and foods on a journal you can identify what it is that’s causing the problems. Less food intolerances to deal with means less stress which means bigger gains!

4. Keeps you honest
If you have food journal which you have committed to filling in, the chance of you deviating is reduced. Eating the wrong food is not as difficult as writing down the wrong food on your journal. It’s no longer a secret which you can forget about. This openness and honesty will help to keep you on track.

5. Educate yourself
Ultimately you know your body better than anyone else. A food journal will help you identify how it works even more. If you’re in a great mood then note it down. Next time you’re feeling great look back at the last time, where is the common ground? The same thing can be done for times when you don’t feel so great. Food journals don’t have to just document food, they can document sleep and exercise as well so you get a whole view of your life and how best to live it.


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