The diet, as a rule, is conducted by those who want to lose weight, or people who carefully monitor their health and seek to lead the right lifestyle. But not all of them know how to keep such a diary that it is informative and helps to draw the right conclusions. Let’s look at the basic principles of keeping a diet and thereby help such people do this without mistakes.
How to keep a diet diary
In order to keep a power diary, you will need to choose the site on which you will do this. Nowadays, you can keep a similar diary both in the old fashioned way – on paper and in a modern way – on the computer. In the first case, you should purchase a good notebook or diary in the second, know how to correctly compose and store text files on a computer. By the way, now on the Internet you can find quite a lot of sites for those who want to lose weight, which have the opportunity to create a food diary.
But, unfortunately, samples of food diaries that are offered on such sites are sometimes too complicated, so those who do not want to go into details can be recommended to keep a diet consisting of four sections. This is your weight, daily calorie intake, physical condition during the day and emotional state. By the way, the last column, if desired, can be removed – then you will get the easiest food diary option.
When is it better to fill in the power diary? No one will give you a specific answer to this question. If you have a wonderful memory, then this can be done once a day. If your memory sometimes fails you, then do not rely on it and make notes in your diet after each meal and after each physical exertion. Be sure to indicate in it how many calories you used with food and how many calories you burned during sports – this will help you understand whether you are moving in the right direction. You can also indicate the exercises that you did to see which of them are most effective.
How to keep a diet diary
But this, as indicated earlier, is the easiest food diary. If desired, it can be supplemented with other data – for example, you can fix your weight in it at the beginning of the day and before bedtime. You can also indicate the time of each meal – these data will help you manage your desire to eat between the main meals.
Weekly or, even better, daily, carefully study all your notes in the diet and summarize the calories consumed and spent. And then draw conclusions from this – how competently your diet is and is there any need to change the degree of your physical activity.
There are times when to calculate calories, especially every day, is quite difficult. Moreover, such an analysis requires quite a lot of time that not everyone has. If it is also difficult for you to navigate in calories, and you do not have the opportunity to count them every day, then you can use an alternative calculation system. Such calories can be found on the Internet – as a rule, for each product you eat and for each physical exercise you performed, glasses are charged. Further, all the final calculations will make a computer for you, which will facilitate your analysis of your actions. But it is still not worth trusting such automated computer programs – their calculations should be perceived only as approximate, indicative results.
How to keep a diet diary
Now let’s give some tips for those who decided to start maintaining a diet diary. If you plan to count in calories, then it will be easier for you to do this if you make it a rule to photograph the labels of the products that you bought, they always indicate the number of calories.
You will also need to purchase home electronic scales on which you will weigh the products you consume. Just be sure to buy culinary scales that indicate weight up to 5 grams.
Do not forget to record not only what you eat, but also what and how much you drink during the day. So, for example, it seems to you that a few cups of coffee per day is a little, but then, when you make the necessary calculations, you will see that this is not worth it.
