Most people cringe at the thought of food journalling.
You may be thinking: “I don’t have time to be writing down everything I eat!, or “I have NO desire to count calories.”, or even “What’s the point?”.
And while I hear you and understand where you’re coming from, it seems to me that there’s a big misunderstanding about how to food journal, the purpose of tracking your food, and the health benefits you can achieve from this simple and free habit.
While my clients often resist starting a food journal at first, by the time they’re done they’ve already experienced benefits and tend to use it as a regular tool for improving their health over the long term.
If you’re not sure if it would benefit you, keep reading to find out why you should consider tracking your food.
BALANCED NUTRITION
A big misunderstanding about tracking food is that it’s about writing down exact measurements and counting calories, and usually for the purpose of weight loss.
As a practitioner, I would never use it for that purpose. One reason I may ask you to track your food is to see if you’re consuming a balanced diet of macronutrients, micronutrients, and intake.
You simply want to write down what you ate and when. For example – breakfast: 8am – 2 eggs with organic sriracha and 1 orange.
This is helpful in trying to pinpoint little adjustments that can be made, as well as root causes of many unexplained symptoms – and is as simple as asking yourself a few basic questions when assessing your journal:
- Does each meal contain some protein, fat, and carbohydrates? (macronutrients)
- Am I eating the rainbow throughout the day? (micronutrients)
- Do I eat enough? Do I eat too much? (intake)
As a practitioner, I would be digging deeper into these areas of balance. But for self-assessment purposes those questions will get you pretty far.
HEALTHY DIGESTION
While conventional food journalling usually keeps you focused on tracking the food alone, that’s a very small (yet important) part of using this tool to improve your health.
Equally important is the health of your digestive tract – specifically your large intestine. In other words, you need to be tracking your poop too!
As uncomfortable as this topic may be, it’s important to understand that your digestion goes from top to bottom and begins before you even eat food (sight and smell) – so what you eat has a direct impact on the health of your digestion.
It’s really important to track your poop because it gives you reliable information about what’s going on in your digestion, which can affect your sleep, energy, and mood, as well as gas, bloating, allergies, acne, and inflammation. A few simple things to track are:
- What colour is it?
- What is its shape and size?
- Does it smell?
- Is it sinking or floating?
- How many times have I gone today?
I can’t overstate the importance of tracking when you have a bowel movement and what it looks like. You can learn more about that here.
As a practitioner, this information would lead me to some key pieces of information of imbalances, necessary testing, and gut health.
INVESTIGATE YOUR SYMPTOMS
When food journalling, you shouldn’t just be tracking your food and poop though. It’s important to track your mood too, or everything else that you notice and feel – in other words, all of your symptoms.
This means writing down anything relevant like:
- headaches
- problems sleeping
- energy
- thirst
- acne
- indigestion
- moodiness
- constipation
- changes in pms
- and everything else you can think of
Writing these things down allows you to look back on your week and try and find the relationship between how your mood (or symptoms) are affected by the foods you ate and your ability to breakdown, digest, and absorb nutrients (digestion).
It’s one of the key components of investigating your symptoms!
Not only does it give you direct information and a timeline to start making connections, but this habit forces you to pay attention to your body and the signs that it gives you.
As a practitioner, I use this information to create a more comprehensive map of what’s going on in your body to look at root causes and what steps need to be made for symptom relief and healing.
But this step is important for your own self-assessment to help you make quick and simple correlations that can help you improve your health.
Tracking your food, mood, and poop for a minimum of seven days can give you incredible insight into your body.
It offers you an opportunity to be a detective in your own health to start understanding the relationship between your food and your habits, symptoms, and digestion.
If you’re ready to get started, you can download a free copy of my food tracking journal that I give to all my clients, and I’ll also send you a video lesson on best practices for using it well.
How’s that for motivation to get started on this important habit? Let’s do this!