Just about any nutrition program you’ll ever find will, at some point, suggest keeping a food journal. There are two pretty good reasons for doing so.
First, what we track typically improves simply because we become more aware of the actions we’re regularly taking. So if we’re trying to improve our nutrition for the sake of achieving some body composition, health, or performance related goal, it makes sense to track what we’re eating.
Second, our recollection of details from only a few days prior is relatively poor when we have to depend solely on our memories. So if we eventually discover that we’re not making the desired progress toward our specified goal, reviewing a document instead of our memory is likely to provide more accurate details of what might need to change to produce better results.
Unfortunately, there are also two main problems with maintaining a food journal that seem to be relatively common and which often prevent people from actually experiencing the benefits of keeping one.
The Cons of Food Journaling
The first is that recording meals can be a bit time-consuming. Tracking apps like My Fitness Pal, Eat This Much, or Lose It! (among others) do certainly speed up the process when compared to pen & paper by allowing you to select from a list of your commonly eaten foods. However, sometimes finding the correct option in the first place can be a bit of a pain. And in any case, selecting each individual food for every single meal can still take a few minutes.
Now in the grand scheme, it may seem like a relatively small hassle to take a few extra minutes after a meal to record the details of what you ate, especially if it helps you make better observations and, subsequently, change what you’re eating in the future.
But that’s where the second (larger) problem shows up: the format of most food journals makes recognizing trends in your eating patterns challenging because the ratio of noise-to-useful-info is too high. Take a look at the following image to see what I mean:
Imagine flipping to the next page (i.e. day) of the journal and reviewing a similar entry. And another page. And another. Now, without looking, try to remember everything that was eaten across those four days—or in this case, just the single day in the picture—and determine where you may have eaten too many or too few calories. Or protein. Or veggies.
Not easy, is it? In fact, it’s actually kind of a pain in the butt.
In any case, because reviewing the entries and deciding on an actionable change is challenging to do, it often doesn’t get done! Eventually your brain realizes, consciously or not, that recording information that you’ll never use is a waste of time… and you stop keeping the journal. Not exactly what we were going for.
So how do you experience the benefits of keeping a food journal without also struggling with the drawbacks of keeping one?
Use a different method to track
Instead of recording the specific foods you ate at a given meal, record the portion size of what you ate—separated into a few key categories—across the day. Like this:
While you lose the ability to see exactly what you ate at any given time using this tracking method, you gain the much more important ability to quickly scan across multiple days and easily recognize where you might be able to make improvements. In this particular case, that might include regularly eating more veggies and, if you weren’t experiencing reasonable physical improvements, eating a bit more consistently on Saturday as compared to the rest of the week.
Using this tracking method does require that you know how to define a portion size for a given food. After all, no one eats “carbs”. What we do eat is bread, fruit, pasta, rice, potatoes, and cookies.
More on all of that in a future tip. For now, a simple way to determine portion sizes for this tracking method is to use a common recommendation from Precision Nutrition: use your hand size. It’s surprisingly more accurate than you’d image and far more practical than counting calories.
Putting it into practice
You have a couple options for homework this week depending on your goals and where you feel you need the most improvement:
If you currently keep a food journal, rarely review it, and are happy with your current diet and results… consider stopping your tracking habit. It probably isn’t helping you, and you might benefit more from doing something else with that bit of extra time.
If you’re not happy with your current diet or results, consider starting to keep a food journal using the “checkmark” method—or change to that method if you’re currently using the “write down everything” method—for at least a week. At the end of the week, spend a couple minutes reviewing the data, and decide on a single change you’ll plan to implement the following week. Then take action on your plan!
Of course, all the TNT coaches are here to help. So consider scheduling a few sessions with us if you feel that you need a little (or a lot) more help than what you might discover for yourself in your food journal.