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Daily Food Diary Helps To Maintain Your Diet

By Julia Taylor-Fernandez

Daily food diary can help you to keep a record of your allergies to foods and even help maintain your diet. You may have decided to control the amount of fat in your diet and every day you look at the scales and it seems to be increasing all the time. If you write down in a food diary all the food, including snacks you are eating every day, your doctor or dietitian can help guide on which foods are high in fat and how to cut them out to help reduce your weight.

For example, you may be eating too many nuts as a snack food. Nuts can be beneficial in a diet and may help reduce blood sugar levels, but they are high in fat. The advice you receive may be to reduce the amount of nuts you eat during snack time.

Changing the food that you eat every day, may help you meet your goals to achieve better health when you using a daily food diary.

Special Diets

Do you feel at the peak of health? If not, why not? We all have some health problems in life, ranging from simple frustrations to life-threatening conditions. When you’re young, you may not make a connection between the food you eat and how you feel.

As age progresses, you’re more likely to question how the foods you eat may impact your overall health. When you were twenty, a load of french fries didn’t seem to make a whit of difference in the way you felt. Now, at fifty, those french fries may hit your stomach with a big plop of indigestion.

Poor Food Choices And Food Allergies

Still, the young are no exception to food discomfort. Perhaps you’re lactose intolerant or allergic to nuts. When you’re young, you’re better able to weather poor food choices and may be entirely unaware of allergies that will come back to haunt you in your later years. A daily food diary can save you many a heartache and a dozen visits to the doctor.

Even if you’re not plagued with adverse health conditions, keeping a food diary can expose dietary weaknesses. Let’s say that you love peanut butter sandwiches, but every time you indulge in peanut butter, your stomach becomes upset. Perhaps your body is telling you, "I need protein." However, the peanuts have their way.

Monitoring What You Eat

Your body gets the protein it requires but your stomach and digestive system rebels. Whether you’re young or old, your food diary gives you the means to monitor what you eat, while comparing the effects of your food menus versus how you feel after eating a meal.

Your daily food diary should form a journal. Make a column for the date and time, the food item and amount, with a column for notes. Snacks count. So often, we eat without thinking. The pounds come on and we wonder why. Here’s how to keep a daily food diary that’s useful.

Watching Calories And Nutrition

When you’re honest with yourself, the daily food diary itemizes every little thing. What about foods you crave? Keeping a daily food diary allows you to eat as you normally do, while, day by day, revealing those foods you eat too much or too little. Keep a keen eye on calories and nutrition. Both good and poor eating patterns will soon show up in black and white.

Keeping a daily food diary can help you zero in on allergies, fat weaknesses or simple cravings that affect your health today and tomorrow. The daily food diary may well expose just where you’re going wrong. If you’ve been feeling poorly but don’t know why, take your diary with you to your next doctor’s appointment. It’s likely your doctor will pick up some clues.

Maintaining Your Blood Sugar Levels With The Right Food

Dietitians and nutritionists also recommend the use of a daily food dairy, helping to keep track of the food you are eating. For example, if you are a diabetic, you may need to keep your sugar levels low, and you realise there is a spike in your sugar levels, then you can look in your food diary to find out what caused the sudden increase in sugars in your blood. It may be candy, or a piece of delicious cake that you thought was low GI that caused the sudden increase in sugar levels.

Knowing about the food you are eating and your reactions, will help guide you in your effort to control and achieve better health. If you need to avoid high sugar foods because you may be a diabetic but you did not realise at the time of eating, that the food was high in sugars then you may be affected with adverse health reactions.

Avoiding High Sugar Foods

Keeping a record of your daily food intake and any adverse reactions to food, can help you decide which foods to leave out of your diet. For example, if you want to keep your blood sugar levels low, then you should avoid high sugar foods like candy and cakes. When you are cooking and you want to control your sugar levels, then you can look at alternative low sugar ingredients. Instead of baking a normal high sugar cake, bake a low carb cake.

Over a period of time you will realise that by knowing what you are eating, and your reaction to certain types of food, is one of the main benefits of the daily food diary.

About the Author:
Julia Taylor-Fernandez has written a number of articles on food, cooking and dieting including General Nutrition, Meal Plans, Salad Dressings, Organic Baby Food, Fruit Flower Baskets, Fresh Fruit, Teen Weight Loss, Nutritional Information, Teen Diets, Healthy Appetizers, Health Food Store.
Keep a lookout for more of her articles on this website.

Did You Know?

What are the kitchen basics I need?
Kitchen basics that every kitchen should have are pots and pans (in a variety of sizes), measuring cups, measuring spoons, mixing bowls and an assortment of kitchen gadgets that make life easier.

One of these gadgets is a can opener. Being forced to saw off the bottom of a can could take a little of the fervor away from cooking. Also consider keeping whisks, spatulas and tongs as part of your cooking basics.

Another item basic that is used often is a drainer/strainer. These can come in the form of bowls or be part of a boiling pan set. It is used to drain spaghetti water from the pasta or can be used for anything similar.