Five Great Reasons to Start Logging What You Eat!

The old saying goes, that you are what you eat.  What does that really mean? It means that the food we eat plays a significant role in every aspect of our health: skeletal structure, energy level and mental acuity, body composition, and our ability to prevent and recover from illness and injury.  If you want to make changes in any of those areas, a logging what you eat is a great place to start!

So what exactly is a food log?

A food log is simply a means of tracking what you eat, the amounts and the frequency.  There are plenty of apps to help you do so, quickly and easily. My personal favorite is Macros. I use it personally, as well as professionally with each of my clients. It’s very user friendly, can be used as both a food tracker and meal planner, and presents a clutter-free layout.  It also offers a variety of ways to analyze what you are eating. What’s more, the basic version is free, and the premium version is a bargain at just around $20 a year. Ultimately, even writing your foods down on paper is a great place to start.  Just a few days of data is likely to mirror how you eat on a regular basis, and is enough to help identify areas for improvement.  Here are five ways in which logging what you eat can help you become a healthier, more fit version of you!

How can a food log help you reach your goals? 

• Keeping a log keeps you honest. You can conjecture all day long about how much you think you eat, how many carbs, the amount of fruits and/vegetables or empty calories you take in.  But until you see it written it out, you won’t know for sure. In my experience, the majority of people do not eat the way they imagine they do (good or bad), and their food log is usually an eye-opening experience.
• Getting out of your comfort zone!  When you track what you’re eating, certain tendencies and/or gaps are very likely to draw attention, and may even make you uncomfortable. Discomfort, of and by itself, is a catalyst for change.
• Building new habits. Consistency is the key to developing new habits. Food tracking apps can help you track your consistency via graphs and summaries.  On paper, you can do something as simple as highlight areas where you would like to improve. You can track as little or as much information as you like: calorie intake/expenditure, daily % of  macronutrients (your carbs/protein and fat intake), and various  micronutrients too – like sodium, cholesterol or fiber. You can set goals, identify your top food sources of those nutrients and visualize how well you’re doing.
• Historical perspective is a building block to future progress.  Once you’ve got the knack of logging your meals and snacks, it’s important to review those logs regularly. Keeping your eye on your progress over time reinforces the good decisions and identifies what needs improvement.
• Details matter!  When going on a “diet”,  it is easy to over-focus on one particular variable, like calories, carbohydrates, or fat.  Although that info is certainly helpful, another layer of detail is even more so. For instance, let’s say you are aiming for 50% of your calories from carbs: then hitting 50% will likely make you feel pretty good.  But what if you look closer and your top sources of carbs are from potato chips, sodas, and bread?  On the other hand, what if your top sources are fruits, vegetables, beans and whole grain cereal? Same level of carbs, same calories gram for gram, but different sources and different nutritional values.  So keeping track of what you eat also means  looking beyond the numbers. Dive deep enough into the details to see whether or not you feel good about your choices, and then make changes accordingly.

After just few weeks of tracking  what you eat, you’ll likely find yourself reading food labels, reaching for new, healthier options at the grocery store and making small changes in your eating habits. And long term changes start with those small steps!

If you’d like to learn more about food logging and how to get started, consider signing up for a one-time  Small Bites Session  or a monthly Infusions package @ www.eatingwithintent.com !