when trying to lose weight, part of the routine is to watch what you eat and make healthier food choices. Sometimes you may not know what the food you put into your body consists of. Even if you think you’re eating healthier options, ingredients could say otherwise. That’s where keeping a food diary comes in handy.
A food diary helps you keep track of everything you eat and drink on a daily basis. You can write it in a physical journal or use an app on your phone. The aim of the magazine is to make you aware of what you are consuming. Once you know this, you can make changes to your diet to improve your weight.
That said, I can attest to the fact that keeping a food diary helps you become aware of the foods and drinks you are putting into your body. This leads to changing your diet and helping with weight loss. However, I feel like no one talks about how much effort you have to put into keeping a food diary if you want to see the Best results.
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I used MyFitnessPal as my food diary.
I decided to go the modern route and use a app to track my food and drink. the application is called MyFitnessPal and you set it up first by having it create your profile. It asks for your age, gender, height, current weight, and desired weight. From there, it will ask you how many kilos per week you want to lose to reach your goal. Once you’ve answered those questions, the app creates a calorie plan for you.
Tells you how many calories you are allowed to eat in one day. When you track your food, you then add up all the calories you consumed and subtract them from the number of calories you have left in a day. Your daily intake is divided into breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks and the amount of water you drink. You can usually easily find a product you’ve consumed using their database, either by scanning the product’s barcode or typing it into the search bar. Find the corresponding product, change the serving size (if necessary) and enter it in one of the sections.
The app can also sync with any smartwatch or phone data you may have to ensure your step and exercise goals are calculated. You can also manually enter any workout. Workouts can even allow you to eat more calories in your day due to the extra calories burned.
Overall, the app is easy to use and has over 14 million food products in its database for you to log in to. With each food item, you not only get a breakdown of calories consumed, but you can even track your nutrition for the day. . See if you can meet your protein Y fiber goals, as well as keep track of sugars, fats, cholesterol, sodium, and even vitamins. They’ll even tell you when certain foods are higher in certain nutrients and warn you to stay within your daily limit.
Finally, you can register your weight whenever you want and the application shows it to you in a graph. This will allow you to see the progress you have made since the start of your journey.
For what it’s worth, I think MyFitnessPal is a great way for anyone to see what they eat. However, as easy as it sounds, there is much more that goes into keeping a consistent food diary.
Surprisingly, keeping a food diary stressed me out.
Not everything you eat will be in the database.
At first glance, recording food is very easy… if they have food on file, that is. Yes, there are so many food items to choose from in the app, but there are also more foods than the app has, and you won’t always find the item you’re eating.
The quickest way to determine if they have your product in the app’s database is to scan the barcode on the product and cross your fingers that it shows up. Most of the time there is a fairly accurate description of the product label. However, there are times when the barcode reads a product other than the brand, or the brand does not exist. This requires you to take additional steps to tell the app if this product is wrong or not in the database. You can go one step further by entering everything manually, but the app has to review the product before you can register it.
Personally, I don’t want to have to do the extra work when I’m already trying to read every label I’m eating. Then, if you submit your product for review, it won’t appear in your journal right away. Therefore, you cannot accurately track your calorie intake at the moment.
Restaurant meals are hard to track.
If you have the free version of this app like me, you will experience this dilemma. It was hard to keep track of what I ate when I went out to a restaurant for a meal. Most restaurants don’t have calories written next to each of their specialty dishes or drinks. So you need to break down in the app exactly what’s on the plate you’re eating.
You also won’t know how many ingredients they put on the plate. You will have the basic ingredients that they list on the menu. However, unless you go into the kitchen and ask what brands of food they’re using and how much of each ingredient they put in, you won’t get an accurate description of what you’re eating. You have an idea, and maybe that will help you choose a better menu item, but you still don’t know exactly. They could be using a high-sugar yogurt in their parfait, or their grilled chicken could be topped with high-calorie sauces and cheeses.
The app has this cool feature where you can scan the meals and it matches the foods with their nutritional information. However, you have to pay for it (which I didn’t). I’m also not sure how accurate the match would be.
Whether it’s a sit down restaurant or quick service takeawayI was left questioning everything I ate, whether it was a healthier option or not.
Introducing food can be tedious.
Let’s say you decide to stop going to restaurants so you can keep track of all the food you’ve been eating. Great, now you can see the markings and gauge for yourself how much you’re putting into your meals at home. However, the reality is that you won’t always be able to scan a barcode on a product and track it.
For example, you are not going to heat continuously microwave frozen meals and call them your lunch or dinner. Well you could, but even “healthy” frozen meals it can add a lot of unhealthy ingredients that you may not be aware of. You would also get tired of eating them fast. So you choose to cook.
With cooking comes many ingredients. With a plethora of ingredients comes a plethora of entries in your food journal. It’s a lot of work, a lot of searching for products and entering them just so you can see how much of each ingredient you can use, and a lot of measurements and weights to make sure you’re calculating everything accurately.
MyFitnessPal has some great features to make the process a little easier. If you create a meal, you can save it to your app. This way, if you do make the dish again, you won’t have to worry about re-entering all the ingredients. You can also create recipes to use later in the app. This helped relieve some of the stress. But the number of times I wanted to try new things prescriptions It didn’t help how many times I would have to add new ingredients to my app’s list.
It distracts you from the present.
He couldn’t enjoy free time with friends or family because he was too busy managing calories. For example, if you go to a restaurant with people, you’re missing the conversation because you’re too focused on entering into the app what ingredients you’re eating and how much is there.
There is the option to take pictures of the plate and enter it manually later. However, you can look at the photo and not remember everything that is there. Especially if you enter it within a day. Or, if you don’t get it in as soon as possible, you won’t know how many calories you have left for the day. So it doesn’t give you an accurate description of what you can eat later on.
The same idea also applies when you are out drinking with your friends. Are you really going to pull out your phone and start typing what’s in your drink? Although I tried to avoid doing that, I couldn’t help but take out my phone and start calculating everything. Not only did I feel rude, I felt like I wasn’t engaged in the conversation because I was constantly on my phone.
final thoughts
It really all comes down to how serious you are about keeping a food diary. How much time and effort do you want to devote to it? Do you want the most accurate information, or do you prefer to have a vague idea of what to look out for?
For me, the bottom line is that the food diary did the job by making me aware of what I was eating. However, I do not need to continue the journey as long as I am more aware of what I am putting into my body.
