Yes, food journals are effective. There are so many kinds of food journals, including 7 day food journal are easy to use for tracking our meal history. There are some researchers found that food journals help us pursue the losing weight goal and make it persistent. Filling a food journal for almost seven days, or six days to be precise, can help people to lose weight more. The result can even reach as many as twice than those who only keep the journal for once in a week or even less. A food journal is also beneficial to know the eating habits and patterns. Tracking the meal intake with a food diary is also helpful to identify foods, which one should be added or reduced.
To track our daily meal, we can start the list with some questions. Here are things that should be put in the food journal:
1. What are we eating?
Write down the specific kinds of foods, including the garnish we eat, the dipping sauce, and the process, whether it is boiled, steamed, or fried.
2. When are we eating?
Some experts recommend the dinner, which is done in the evening, should be less than 500 calories. Recording the time of eating can also help us to find our eating pattern and tendency, for instance late-night snacking.
3. How much are you eating?
The amount of food also determines the daily intake. It can affect the amount of calorie that we consume. The easy way to measure the foods and drinks is with kitchen utensils as benchmarks, such as tablespoons, bowls, glass. If we want to be precise, we can use a kitchen scale. The common unit to measure foods comes in gram.
We also have more printable journal you may like:
Printable Weight Watchers Journal
Journal Cover Writing Page Printable
Printable Exercise Logs Journals
From the previous discussion, we can find the fact that the food journals, including 7 day food journal, are effective. What can we get from keeping a food diary?
1. Losing weight
When we write and read our 7 day food journal, this helps us to remind how many foods and drinks we consume. We can notice every single amount of the particular foods and drinks. We tend to realize that we eat or drink too much if there is something that helps us to realize, including 7 day food journal. The food journal also helps us not to overdo our weight losing program. This journal also works the same as when we limit the intake.
2. Finding food intolerance
If we have an allergy, our body immediately reacts to the allergens, including foods and drinks. Sometimes, we forget what we eat and drink in a day. When allergy attacks, it'll be hard for us to trace the trigger. If we immediately write our consumption history in the food journal, we can pinpoint the trigger soon.
3. Healthier nutrition
Recording our consumption in a day is not just about reducing calories. This can be a good device to know the right composition of nutrition of foods. For instance, if we want to gain muscle, we can eat more foods containing high protein.