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Keeping a Food Journal for Weight Loss Success

Food Journal

Food Journal

Many of the better, and most successful, weight loss programs either come with a food journal or recommend that you keep one. If you take out a few minutes each day to write down what you eat, when you eat it, how you’re feeling, and other information you may like to include, you can have significantly more success with your weight loss efforts than people who don’t keep a food journal.

Why to have a Food Journal

It’s not necessary to keep a food journal for the rest of your life. After a couple of months, you should have an idea of which foods keep you feeling better and more energized, and which foods cause you problems. You should also have fine-tuned which amounts satisfied you and when you ate too much and how it made you feel.

Here is a list of some of the things you may want to track in your food journal. Remember, no one is going to see this journal but you, so be accurate and honest. That is the only way you will benefit from what you record.

  1. What you ate and in what quantities
  2. Calories, grams of fat, grams of protein, grams of carbohydrates, fiber
  3. Were you really hungry or just craving something?
  4. What time of day did you eat?
  5. What were you doing that may have triggered your desire to eat?
  6. How did you feel right after you ate? Satisfied, over-full, still hungry?
  7. How did you feel about two hours after you ate?

There are many food journals online that you can download and use if you do not have a diet program that includes one. A spread sheet, like those you can make with Microsoft Excel are also good. You can create as many, or as few, columns as you wish and expand the columns to fit any notes you might like to include.

What You Can Learn From a Food Journal

If you are subject to “emotional” eating, or eating when you aren’t really hungry, it is important to identify why. What was the emotional experience you were going through when you felt you needed to eat? Did you enjoy the food, or just bolt it down? Maybe you were having bad feelings that you wanted to suppress, and food worked to “push” down the feelings.

The important thing here is to tie the emotional eating with a particular situation. Then, when you are not caught up in this emotion, calmly think of a way you can satisfy whatever situation the food was solving for you with a non-food response. You may be amazed at how much you mindlessly eat when you are in the throes of an emotion and not really hungry at all. But you won’t get these connections if you don’t keep track in a food journal.

Keeping a food journal is not hard to do and it will go a long way towards insuring your weight loss success.

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General Weight Loss Tips

New Year, New Look

Welcome to 2011! I have to say I’m so excited for the new year. I don’t specifically know why, but I have a lot of energy and excitement about new adventures and opportunities this year. 2010 was so good to me, and I just feel very good about the direction I’m headed in.

You may notice a new header on my blog. The last one bugged me from the very first day. I wanted something new and threw that one together very quickly. I liked the type and colors, but needed something a little cleaner and focused on my blog goals. So here it is. A photo of me from my Wear it Well Fall 2010 ecourse, a photo of my favorite meal, and a photo of my first 5k bib. Food, Fashion and Fitness.

I’ve also updated my “About” page, which I hope you will check out. It was lonnng overdue. I think I last updated it two years ago. I needed a new mission statement of sorts because I feel like I’ve finally figured out what I want this blog to be and where I want it to take me. I wanted it to explain who I am and where I stand with my health and weight loss efforts as of today. My biggest blogging struggle came from comments expecting me to be like other healthy living bloggers.

And I don’t see myself in that category, at all. I see myself as someone still on this journey. A lot of the healthful lifestyle bloggers are about women who gained some weight during college and then lost it. They also blog about everything they eat. I admire their discipline and hard work and am not at all knocking what they do, but that is not who I am. If you’re looking for those bloggers check out my “inspirational blogs” list and you will find many. They inspire me and I aspire to be more disciplined.

I’m someone who needs to lose 150 lbs to be considered “average weight”, I have been overweight or obese my whole life, I struggle with food addiction and binge eating disorder. I also enjoy  a whole range of foods, I enjoy cooking, shopping locally and organically. AND I love pizza, indian food, mexican food and a whole host of other food items that just aren’t traditional “diet” fare. My goal in the coming year is moderation, not elimination (except for sugar). And I will get there, this is just my journey. I’m not an advocate for anyone or any way of living.

My deepest wish for my blog is that I can inspire other women more like me, who have a lot of weight to lose, who have pain (emotional and physical) when they exercise, who deal with binge eating, who are afraid of who they have become, who fear what they could become. That we can do this, that it is hard, that we can have a wonderful life in the meantime, and that we can love and nurture ourselves the way we truly deserve.

I also wanted to mention that I now have a Facebook (centered around this blog) for anyone that wants to be friends and communicate that way. And I can be found on twitter: @lorriefenn.

And finally, thank you for reading. Thank you for being here for the past four years, commenting and emailing. Sharing your stories with me and rooting me on through this journey. Your kindness and time here are not lost on me and the effort I put into my blog. I hope to bring more of myself to this space this year and am very excited to share with you.