What is a daily food diary?
A food diary is a log in which you can keep details of what you eat and drink every day. This log is best for people who are conscious about their diet. Your health widely depends on what you eat in a day. If you have the power to control what you eat and drink, you can manage your health and prevent various health problems effectively.
Who uses the daily food diary?
If you have felt that your choice of food is not appropriate for your body and you should reconsider what you are eating, you can use a food log. A food log is a special type of record sheet in which you record what you eat on daily basis. A person who wants to monitor the intake of calories can use the food log no matter to which age group he belongs. In most cases, the healthcare provider also uses the food log for his patients.
How a food log used on daily basis can be useful for you?
Almost every one of us loves eating but remembering what we eat every day is not possible for us. Therefore, we have to control our diet by keeping an eye on our food; we will need a tool like a daily food diary. This tool is useful in several ways and some of them have been explained below:
It helps you determine your food habits:
Many of us are not aware of our eating habits because we don’t notice what we eat. When you use a food log, you can easily keep track of your everyday meal, you can easily know your habits and if someone asks you about it, you will not be clueless as to what you should say.
It helps you get the desired weight:
Losing or gaining weight is all about our eating habits. Dieticians recommend people keep an eye on their food so that they can figure out how many calories they take in a single day and how many they should take in a day to reach their dream weight number.
It is helpful in disease control:
Many diseases are closely linked to our diet. For example, people with diabetes type 1 and 2 are recommended to control their diet to regulate their blood sugar level. Such patients are asked by their doctors to make a log and mention each and everything that they eat.
When the log is full of daily food details, the patient shows it to the doctor. In this way, the doctor determines if the diet is the main cause of the problem and whether the disease can be controlled with diet or not.
How to use the daily food diary?
If you have a daily food diary with you, you should be able to use it in an efficacious way. Here are the tips that you can follow:
Write everything you eat or drink:
You should focus on your eating habits and see what you eat and how much. When you have a log to maintain, you should be ready to write down everything no matter how trivial it is. There should not be anything missing in the log because your doctor is required to know everything to prescribe you the optimal diet plan.
Write down as soon as possible:
Some people don’t want to write the details in the log every time they eat anything. So, they rely on their memory and write everything at the end of the day. This might be a good strategy for those people who have a busy schedule to follow. However, they are more likely to forget a few details which will lead to making your food log less effective.
Estimate how much you eat:
When you are on diet, you need to keep an eye on how much you eat to ensure that you don’t exceed the daily calorie intake limit. For this purpose, you should be able to estimate your diet. You should know the quantity of your food in grams so that you can estimate your calorie intake also.
