Are There Other Ways To Keep A Food Journal?
Q: I log and track my food to make sure I’m not going over my calories. I appear to be having success with that because I’m losing weight like I want to. Ordinarily, that would be a good thing that would result in someone not having much to complain about but since I’m a woman, I’m going to find something to complain about regardless. So my issue with something that’s clearly working for me and I should continue doing is that all the shit that’s involved with keeping a food journal takes up too much of my time. Are there any other options?
A: The advantages of logging and tracking food are many, some of which include portion control; awareness of what and how much you’re eating and the impact on your health, weight, appearance, mood, and performance; and a breakdown of nutritional data in an item so you have a clear view of how it fits into your overall requirements. It’s for these reasons that the research is very clear that maintaining a food journal results in much greater success at losing weight and keeping it off than not keeping a record of what you eat and drink.
As beneficial as food journals are, maintaining one takes a bit of effort. For some, steps like reading nutrition labels or referring to books with calorie counts and nutritional values for items without them, weighing and measuring stuff, and logging everything by hand with pen and paper is a minor inconvenience that isn’t that big of a deal. But for others, those steps are too burdensome and time-consuming to sustain the practice of journaling, even when some of the friction points are somewhat lessened with the use of a mobile or web-based application.1For example, apps eliminate much of the math work for any given portion size. It appears that you fall into the latter camp.
So what’s a person like you to do?
Well, one method that makes the maintenance of a food journal less involved is using a meal plan template where you consume the same items for a number of days in a row before switching things up, if desired. By doing that, there’s no need to enter the names, serving sizes, and nutritional data of everything you put in your mouth every time you do so because everything is constant from day to day. As such, all you have to do is record everything once and then duplicate the info for however long you maintain the same menu before swapping it out for another. In this instance, the only responsibility is weighing and measuring the portions out as they’re consumed.
A static meal plan is a good option that takes a lot of the work out of food journaling. But that mainly requires eating the same meals and snacks for stretches at a time, which can get tedious depending on your preferences. Here, you can leave one or two feedings open in your meal plan so you have flexibility. However, in the event that’s still not enough because you want to enjoy a more varied selection of food on a regular basis, then you might be better off using the camera on your smartphone to keep a photo-based account of food.
Instead of maintaining a record of food consisting of words and numbers, you can maintain one with pictures. All that needs to be done is to take a pic of everything you eat and drink and keep the photos in your gallery or share them on social media for extra accountability from friends, family, and complete strangers who stalk you through the euphemistic language of being “followers”.
Based on studies, the camera-based approach to food journaling appears to have the same impact as a traditional food journal on portion control, food awareness, and accountability. Moreover, findings suggest that the two competing methods are equally effective for weight management despite one allowing for the eyeballing of portions instead of them being accurately weighed or measured, as well as the specific calorie or nutrient content of what’s consumed not being factored or of importance with the use of photos. Given these considerations, this approach is probably the best method for someone who wants to enjoy a lot of different shit throughout the week while keeping a food record with very minimal effort.
At the moment, the camera-based approach is the least laborious way to go about recording food intake and enjoying the benefits of the practice. But if you want to skip the shit altogether while doing something that still makes weight loss possible by helping to control your food intake, then you might want to consider intuitive eating to better listen to your hunger and fullness cues so you only eat when you need to and stop once you’re satisfied so you don’t take in more calories than are necessary. Another alternative is intermittent fasting, which reduces the number of feeding opportunities throughout the day by restricting food to a limited eating window. Both of those approaches eliminate the documentation and associated elements of food journaling that make the activity a chore for people such as yourself.
Now, does anyone else have a fitness or nutrition question of their own that they want to ask?
Glossary: calories, fitness, food, meal plan, nutrition
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