Food Journaling

Anyone who has been reading this site for any length of time understands the basics of weight loss.

Eat less calories than you burn.

Simple right?

Well, I am going to make a bold statement here… Most people have no clue how many calories they eat in a day!

They might think they do, but if I was a betting man I would wager that they would be wrong 90% of the time. This isn’t a knock on anyone; it’s just that if you haven’t taken the time to assess your eating habits pretty closely you just haven’t developed the skill-set necessary to do so.

If you ask someone what they ate the day before they will inadvertently omit things and it is those calories that can quietly sabotage you!

Here is a real world example for you, stolen from a personal trainer friend of mine.

He had a client, a middle-aged woman, who had been training with him for a couple of months. She was visiting him 3 times a week for serious strength and conditioning training and while definitely getting stronger, and looking more toned, but she had barely lost any weight in that time; it was driving my friend nuts! He had given her a basic meal plan to follow, and she swore up and down she had been following it. At his wit’s end, he made her start food journaling for a week so he could really dig into the problem and get his client the success she wanted.

After a week the problem was quickly identified and man, what a surprise it was!

She actually had been following the meal plan believe it or not, but with one addition she hadn’t been telling him about.

She loved Welch’s Grape Juice and drank 4-5 glasses a day.

If you have a basic understanding of nutrition, I am sure you (just as my friend did) immediately realize that is a gigantic problem of Galactus-like proportions! Unfortunately for her though, she didn’t know it was an issue.

It wasn’t that she was intentionally trying to hide anything, it’s just that she didn’t think to really pay attention to the liquid calories in her diet.

Let’s take a quick look at what 4 glasses a day of Grape juice was doing to her, and what cutting it out of the diet accomplished.

A single serving size of Welch’s sugar water Grape Juice is 180 calories (and we are going to give her the benefit of the doubt that she was only drinking a single serving size per glass). So four glasses equals 720 calories.

A day.

That means over the course of one week she was taking in an unaccounted for 5040 calories!

Holy bucket of empty calories Batman!

We all should know that you have to burn approximately 3500 calories to lose a pound (and conversely, taking in 3500 calories over what you burn will add a pound); so some quick back of the napkin math shows that every week she was sabotaging herself to the tune of a pound and a half.

Upon seeing this dietary sabotage on the paper in front of him, my friend immediately got her to promise to switch to water and fresh green tea and lo and behold the weight started to fly off her body almost immediately!

Despite having her tell him what she was eating, it was the act of actually writing everything down that allowed them to Sherlock Holmes the situation and figure out why a program that had worked for so many others was “failing” for her. Two months worth of frustration on both their parts solved by one week of simple food journaling.

So what are the keys to this invaluable exercise you ask? Let me give you some tips!

First off, you really only need to journal until you get a firm handle on what you are eating.

The value of the exercise decreases drastically once you understand what you should be eating, and how much. So don’t feel overwhelmed by the effort that you might feel you are putting into it at first.

That being said while it may sound like a simple task to write down what you eat, there are a few things that definitely can help in the process. Success in food journaling (what to write in it and what to do with what you learn from it) can greatly increase your likelihood of success with weight loss and healthier eating, so let’s try and get the most out of it.

• Be Consistent – Find a time where you can accurately write down your food choices for the day (and keep them in a central location, don’t be that guy who writes his entry on a different piece of paper every day). For many people, it is easier to enter one full day at a time; try making writing in your food journal an after dinner ritual. If it is too hard to remember everything you chowed down on for a full day, make your entries after each meal if you have to. The important thing is not to let more than one day go by without recording your entries, because then you are bound to omit things.

• Write Down Everything You Eat – The most important key to success with food journaling is to list all foods you consume each day. Yes, that includes snacks and it most certainly includes beverages (damn you Welch’s Grape Juice *shakes fist*). For each item you record, include:
  • Time of day you ate it
  • Type of food
  • Portion size

  Without some level of detail the exercise loses a lot of value. Saying you had chicken, rice and broccoli is one thing, but saying you had a 6oz grilled chicken breast, 1 cup of diced broccoli and 1/2 cup of brown rice is another (I will let you decide which is more useful). For the first week you are going through this exercise, just simply write everything you eat. Don’t worry about trying to change things up and don’t judge your food choices until you have a good baseline written down. Be like a scientist! The first and most important step in the process is to collect data on your current eating habits. Tony Stark did not build the Iron Man armor in a day; there was definitely a lot of time spent researching, collecting data and writing plans out before he climbed into that glorious piece of machinery! You may find that after three days you are already learning a lot about your strengths and weaknesses and subconscious eating patterns but it is going to take time until you unleash the superhero within you, so be patient.

  If you are journaling to try to solve issues with feeling lethargic, or trying to figure out why you are so hungry at certain points of the day, you can also record things like what you were doing or how you felt after eating the meal or snack.

• Look For Patterns – After you have spent a week writing everything down, review the data you have collected and make some conclusions about your eating habits. Use these insights to create your basic food goals; try to make them concrete and easy to evaluate. Don’t be too drastic either (especially at first)! Look for things like over abundances of empty calories ingested from liquid beverages. Look at your overall meal compositions (remember, a “good” meal is mostly lean protein, fresh veggies and a minimal amount of whole grains) and see if you need to be cutting back on something or adding more of a certain kind of food to your diet (and remember we aren’t talking about a temporary “diet”… see why those things make me madder than the Incredible Hulk here). Like anything else, this is going to be an iterative process so make a first cut at things and then the following week go through the process again and adjust as necessary!

• Don’t Go It Alone – It can make a huge difference when you know that other people are involved, and that they might hold you accountable! Having a second set of eyes on your food journal can really be helpful, whether it is in person or via email or a social networking site. Sharing the experience can definitely make it more fun and motivating! And studies have shown that people who get support lose significantly more weight than people trying to go it alone.

So are you serious about getting your eating habits under control?

If so, proclaim it for the word to see by dropping a comment below!

PS: If you want help becoming a real-life superhero, then make sure to get your copy of “The Heroes’ Transformation Guide“ and support the site. Don’t wait!

PPS: Also, be sure to get your free e-book, “The 7 Fitness Obstacles Newbies Face” by subscribing to our mailing list… (no spam, I promise!)