How to Make a Food Diary

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Brenda Thompson, registered dietitian and owner of Life Skills Nutrition. In this segment I am going to talk about how to make a food diary. It is easy to create your own food diary. You can use a small tablet that you can carry around with you such as this one here. This is just a tablet that I had laying around, and it's very nice and convenient. It will sit in your purse, it also has this nice band that you can put around and keep organized. Another type of tablet you may want to use is something like this. This is very nice because it has a pocket in the front which you can carry a calculator. You can also put any literature that you receive from your exercise trainer or if you want to carry some information about your favorite restaurants and the calories that they have. This is just a nice tablet also because it has lines and a lot of room for you to write your information. Another thing that you can do is use an Excel or a Word spreadsheet. This is an example that I created. This would be an example for day one. Here you see there is listed foods and beverages, and you want to make sure that you include your water that you drank throughout the day, the portion sizes, the brand names or the restaurants that you ate at, and then your motivation for eating. Here I have put on my food diary six meals because I like to eat small frequent meals sometimes especially on the days that I exercise. It does not mean that I have to use all of these slots because some days I may just eat three meals, however I've given myself the room that I need. Some people do prefer six small frequent meals a day, and some people only eat three meals a day. There are certain factors that play a role in how often a person eats. They my eat more frequently on days that they've worked out. Some people even eat more on days that they are really stressed, and I'm not considering that you need to eat because you are stressed. Some times those days just require that your body does need more calories. So we need to make sure that we factor that in in creating our food log. "