How a 3-Day Food Journal can save your life…

I sincerely mean that when I typed, how a 3-day food journal can save your life.

Let me explain.

When people start our program, we ask them about their goals, health history and current eating habits.  We get them set up in workouts, then we want to see a few days of what they eat and we start working our accountability plan.

 

Some clients are able to document this relatively easily in an app called My Fitness Pal.

Others for whatever reason have trouble providing this information.

Now before all the daggers come out, I understand, this takes time and we are all limited on time.  We get that.

What a food journal does is gives us information to help us help hold each person accountable, give recommendations, find potential gaps or reasons they may not be seeing results.

Now, this is not forever.

Personally, seeing about 3-days’ worth of food is all we need.  It can be written down on paper, sent in an email at the end of the day or in an app like My Fitness Pal.

More than anything it helps bring awareness to what is being consumed.

It is so easy to eat 300

calories and not so easy to burn 300 calories!

When you track what you eat for a few days, you will be surprised at what each food item contains from a nutritional value.  Some things are huge bang for your buck while others you get so mad cause you can only have an ounce…like cheese!  (Yummy salt and fat!)

The first place we look is how many total calories are being consumed daily vs how many calories are being burned daily.  If weight loss is the goal we have to create a caloric deficit of 300-500 calories per day.

We can’t be too deep into a deficit because your body will think it is starving and will hold on to everything storing it as fat.  On the flip side if we have too many calories you will see weight gain.

This is where consistency comes in.

We see people do well Monday through Thursday, then Friday, Saturday, Sunday-Funday comes in and it wrecks what started as a perfect week.

So how does a 3-day food journal save your life?

It starts the process to better health.  It gives awareness to what you are currently doing and does it support your current goals?