Lessons From My Food Diary

A food diary is a useful tool in figuring out how much you are eating and why you eat. Study your food diary to find areas you can improve on.

Looking back over my food journal, several things hit me loud and clear:

1. I make poor choices when I eat in restaurants and I go 500 or more calories over my daily calorie limit.

2. I eat more fried foods and sweets when I eat with certain family members.

3. I use food to feed my emotional pain rather than my hunger pains. Comfort foods push down my feelings of stress, anxiety, boredom, depression and even happiness. I seek a sugar high when my stress level is high.

4. I think food with make me happy, but that feeling only lasts a few minutes and I feel worse afterwards for not sticking to my program and causing a setback in my weight loss.

5. I tend to white-knuckle it on the diet for short periods of time before I feel deprived and cave in to eat the foods I have been craving. This turns into a vicious cycle of yo-yo dieting.

The good news is that knowledge is power. Now that I am aware of my diet weaknesses I can work on them and challenge myself to do better on each of these items.

A weekly review of my food diary will show if I've made any progress in fixing any of the problems I've detected in my eating habits.