How to Keep a Food Diary

You may have to keep a food diary for medical reasons or you may just be interested in tracking your eating habits. Whatever the reason, here's how to take the hassle out of doing it. 

Steps 

1.Buy a ruled notebook if you are planning to do this for any longer than a week. If you use scraps of paper for a length of time, they will eventually get messy and scattered. 

2.Take time to prepare the notebook for tracking food. You don't have to do every page, but you'll need to do enough to keep you going for a couple of days. Nothing stops motivation dead more than not having the page you need prepared.

3.Consider how to lay out the page. If you just need a simple food diary, you can just date the page and then write down the times you eat and what you eat. If you need a more complex food diary, you may need to rule the page up into columns.

4.Remember to take your food diary with you and write in it as soon as you can after eating. It's much easier than getting to the end of the day and having to try and remember what you ate.

Tips
•If you are keeping the food diary because you want to lose weight or because you have an eating disorder, it can sometimes help to have a "How I felt when I ate this" column. This will help you keep track of the reasons you eat.