Weight Control Tool: A Food Journal

A food diary can become so much more useful for your weight wars if you use

All the weight control experts recommend keeping a record of what you eat. Seeing your daily intake in gloomy and white reality can hasten your pride in your self-discipline, gently confront you with some less than stellar choices you've made, or cast you into a morass of guilt and depression when you face the epicurean debacle that your food intake represents.

A food diary can issue forth so much more useful for your weight wars if you use it as a tool for self-exploration and self-discovery. It allows you to create an oasis of support that anchors you in a world tossed by competing priorities, overwork, incredible dietary temptations, and social pressures that all lead to frustration, inwardly directed anger, diminished self-esteem, and terminal fatigue.

What do we need to do to create such a tool?

1. Buy a good spiral notebook with lots of pages and a hard cover - you're going to keep this for a long time so jib aught that's going to easily fall apart.

2. Enter the date you started your journey: this is the baseline dead against which you will call to mind your entries for the next several months. Under the date, enter the following information as fussily as you can make it, as of this very moment:

Age Height Weight Measurements

Waist

Bust

Hips

Thighs

Upper arms

Clothing size

Type of hairstyle

Any daily exercise obtained

Today's primary mood

Self-Appraisal (find 3 adjectives for each area)

General appearance

Size and shape

Personal characteristics

Interpersonal relationships

Self-value

Family or romantic relationships

Level of self-satisfaction

3. Each day, you are going to enter not only what you ate, but the thoughts and emotions that accompanied the food. Note: Don't turn to obsessive - it more productive to keep this daily but if you run out of time and energy now and then, skip it, and get back to it when you can.

4. It is going to take some thought and memory-searching to ferret out what you need so find yourself a quiet spot where you can be solo and quiet. Keep your book there, shut off at hand, so you can quickly visit when you want to record some that occurs to you.

5. Start teaching yourself to identify the inner landscape that accompanies your food intake. Focus on the moments till you ate: How did you feel at the time? Were you (genuinely) hungry - create a 1 to 10 rating scale for yourself, ranging from "not really" up to "starved, faint, light-headed." Were you bored? Were you unfulfilled and trying to calm yourself down? Were you corrosive and stuffing that vials of wrath down your own throat? Were you feeling sorry for yourself? Were you with good friends and just wanted to be part of the group? Were you just not thinking? Were you trying to punish yourself -or someone else? You may find that you ate several times a day for the same reason or that the triggers to eat differed throughout the day depending upon the vicinity and people involved at the time.

6. Once you have jotted down everything related to the minutes foremost you ate (you may start out with very little to say but as you warm to this exercise, you will find yourself recording more and more information), consider how you felt directly afterwards. Did you feel satiated and serene? Did you feel proud of your food choices? Were you satisfied with all your selections? Did you feel stuffed and uncomfortable? Did you feel guilty re the choices you made? Were you troubled with yourself for giving in to temptation and dirty your diet for the day? Did the food make you light and energetic or heavy and sleepy? Did you think hard by tomorrow morning's weigh-in with dread or anticipation?

7. Take a look at the day from the perspective of now (last thing in the evening or a look back the following morning). Try to look at your entries as if they belonged to someone else. As a dispassionate third party, what are your conclusions in relation with the individual who recorded this data? Is this a self-aware, consciously motivated person or someone who lives on auto-pilot with little planning or direction? Is this someone who has internalized their diet goals and attempts to control their environment and intake? Is this an individual who merely 'talks the talk" but pursues doings that valley those verbal rules? Is this a happy person who is graciously continuing the weight struggle with a sense of humor and self-forgiveness? Or is this someone who resents the conspiracies of nature which go to load on as much fat as possible, to ward off some improbable future famine?

8. If you are generally satisfied with the day's food intake, give yourself a mental pat on the back and relish the day's accomplishment. Promise yourself that one great day proves forever that you can do it. Identify a small, non-edible, reward for your self-discipline, inner strength, and personal commitment. Record your conclusions and bask in the self-satisfaction you so richly deserve.

9. If you feel disappointed in what you read, remind yourself that it is only one day in a lifetime of thousands of days. Forgive yourself and start over. Think in relation with one or two changes you can make so the following day's record will not be quite so disappointing. Guard athwart swearing that today will be perfect: you are not going to get there overnight but you will get there, over time, slowly, one step at a time. You are learning to take baby steps that will nudge your food intake into closer coalition with your goals. You are going to gradually add techniques to your attic of weapons to keep temptation at bay. The simple fact of intake insight will keep slowly propelling you towards the goals you have so solicitously set.

10. At the end of your entry, enter your weight for the day - it will on and on fluctuate a little bit but will show you how you are doing when viewed over a period of time.