Dear [Food] Diary — Starting line fitness

The other day a friend asked what's the best food diary app or method. I thought this would be a good question to answer here. I told my friend that I use and have my clients use MyFitnessPal. I like MyFitnessPal because it has a large database of foods and brands. You can also save commonly eaten foods and recipes. Also if you input your weight and set goals it will set a daily caloric goal for you. It also has a blog, community challenges that you can enter and a host of other features that I don't think most people use. The thing is most food diary/tracker apps do all of these things. So when it comes to picking the best one it's a matter of finding the one with the best food database (for you) and the best user interface (for you). So that's how you pick the best app.

So now that that's out of the way, is a food diary even necessary? Yes. But not for the reasons you think. People turn to apps mainly because they will give caloric outputs. The problem here is that these outputs are only guesstimates. First guess is how much are you eating? Unless you're using a food scale (the large majority of us aren't) you're probably underestimating how much you're eating. Second guess is the app figuring out what's in your meal. So unless you enter the exact brand or exact recipe you're not going to get the exact calories. Third guess is that you'll actually use all of those calories. Everyone's metabolism is different so we could eat the same exact meal and absorb completely different amounts of calories depending on numerous factors.

So why have a food diary? The diary will point out your habits, good and bad. You wake up and have a great breakfast in which you prepare for the day ahead? Yeah, keep doing that. After the weekly staff meeting you head directly to the break room to see what sweet treat that lady from accounting made? Well you might want to rethink the path back to your desk. (Also you should learn that lady's name and say thank you. She's not only contributing to your waistline, she's also doing big things for office morale.)

The office scenario brings up some other things you should note when doing a food diary. Obviously you should write down what and how much you're eating. You should also note where you're eating and who you're eating with. You can also note things about how you feel before and after you eat. How long did it take you to eat?

Eating in your car is a lot different than eating at your dining room table and so is what you eat in those places. Got that one friend who always talks you into ordering another glass of wine or drink? We've all heard that "stressed" spelled backwards gives us "desserts".

This is to say that a good food diary might tell you that it's not the food that needs to change. It might be the situations you're in. It might be the people you're with. It might be the way you're feeling. It might be you.

The best thing a food diary does is let you know not only what you eat but also the circumstances in which you're eating it. As GI JOE taught us, knowing is half the battle. The other half is using the diary to make the necessary changes. That's for another blog post. In the meantime, if you have questions or have mastered the diary itself and need next steps, reach out in the comments and I'll get back to you asap.