Austin Hastings

I recently decided to take on the challenge of working with a personal trainer to help whip my butt into shape for the Marathon.  My trainer Alan has done a great job thus far, assisting me in focusing on the right cardio, weight training and dietary plan. One of the key tools Alan has had me utilize is the daily food diary.

I’ve been at a steady and healthy pace of losing around 3 to 4lbs per week since training with Alan.  A lot of the progress has been due to the Marathon training, which has had me doing various forms of activity 6 days a week.  A key component to the healthy weight loss has been dietary change.  I have to credit the food diary for helping me to rein in my eating and get it on track so that it can work in concert with the physical training.  In fact, I don’t believe I’d be able to train as hard as I am now if I hadn’t taken control of the diet.  It’s amazing how much what you eat helps or hinders your body’s abilities on a daily basis.

Keeping a daily food diary isn’t necessarily easy at first, but it’s worth it!  It’s important to keep in mind the benefits to keeping a diary, and the vast importance of those benefits to your health and fitness.  Keeping a diary, much like skimming through your bank account to see what you REALLY spent, helps one to have a persistant reality check about what they’re consuming.  After a week of keeping tabs on everything you’ve consumed, and at what times, you begin to see at-a-glance certain patterns, many of which are less than enjoyable to realize.  But hey, some times a reality check is needed as impetus to true change.  I know it always helps fuel the fire for me.

Food Diary Approaches

Google Docs Spreadsheet: http://docs.google.com
My initial approach in doing the food diary was to create a spreadsheet using Google Docs.  This worked fairly well, as I could see most of the week’s entries on one screen for at-a-glance comparison.  Another benefit was that I could share the document with my trainer, allowing him to keep tabs on me whenever he’d like.  I’d say this is a good approach, as Google Docs are free to use, easily sharable and you can create some great spreadsheets if you’re so inclined.  My setup was one tab per week, using rows for each meal/snack and columns for the days.  I also included a cell to enter fitness, supplements and current weight for each day to weave that info into the overall consideration of what I was eating for a holistic picture.  If you’re seeing your weight stagnate or actually go up, you might be able to understand why pretty quickly by glancing at the last couple week’s worth of tabs.

Online Food Diary: http://www.gyminee.com/ or http://myfooddiary.com/
While the Google Doc Spreadsheet was a great, light-weight tool for tracking, I’ll have to say that online food diaries take the concept to a whole new level.  The Online version feels like the equivalent of always having a nutritionist giving real-time feedback on what you’re eating.  The general concept is that you have a profile on a site, and for each food or drink item you enter, the system has a database with nutritional information that is used to calculate the state of your diet.  Using one of these sites, you can tell throughout your day how you’re doing in terms of vitamins and minerals, caloric intake and much more.  Some sites even show how far along you are in terms of daily recommended servings of vegetables, meat, dairy, etc.  Additionally, there are fitness components where you can register what kind of activity, for how long, and it will calculate estimated calorie burn.  The site then compares the data from your diary to that of your fitness and shows you quite a lucid picture of caloric intake versus what you burn.  If there was ever any question as to why your body is worsening in state, stagnating or even improving, this kind of tool definitely helps in gaining insight into why, which can inform the decisions to make things better, or to sustain progress.  A fun twist with Gyminee.com, is that in addition to these tools, they also provide a social network ala Facebook where you can share your progress, meet gym buddies, and more.  Very cool.  These services charge a nominal monthly or quarterly fee.

Other Methods:
Of course, there’s a multitude of methods one can try.  There’s something to be said for the sweet simplicity of carrying a notepad with you and documenting with good ol’ pen and paper.  Or, as I tried briefly, one can use their iPhone or other smartphone’s notepad feature to document on-the-fly.

Each person will approach the logistics of keeping a food journal differently, and that’s to be expected.  I highly recommend giving it a try, and if one method doesn’t work, perhaps try a different approach.  This is certainly a great way to take control of your diet, which is an absolute cornerstone of health and happiness.

Want some motivation to give food diaries a try?  Read the recent San Francisco Chronicle article To drop pounds, write down everything you eat.

Happy journaling!

Austin