Keeping a Food Diary: Examples, Ideas, and Inspiration to Fuel Your Food Journaling

What Is a Food Diary?

A food diary, or food journal, is a log where you can keep records of the foods you eat, how much of them you eat, and when you eat them. Even the most basic examples of food diaries can help you better understand your eating habits and identify unhealthy tendencies that you might wish to eliminate from your diet—or even your budget. Research has shown that a food diary can be an effective weight loss tool.

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Ultimately, however, a food diary can be whatever you make of it. For foodies that like to try out all the newest places in town, a food diary can serve as a way to keep track of their activities and savor those cherished sense memories. Meanwhile, both aspiring and amateur chefs can keep track of the things they cook and track their progress toward crafting the perfect recipes.

However you choose to put your food journal to use, it can be a simple guide toward paying more attention to what you eat. In turn, that added attention can hold you accountable and help you meet your goals—whether those goals include a healthier lifestyle, a healthier budget, or simply a healthier appreciation of the foods that you love to cook and eat.

Food Journal Ideas: What Should You Include in a Food Diary?

Beyond the what, how much, and when of your eating habits, there’s so much you can include in your personalized food diary. Explore these additional options to build up your food journaling practice and make your diary work for you:

• Where you eat: Once you sit down to think about it, over time you might notice just how many places you actually eat. Whether it’s a lunch on the go in your car, during a movie night on the couch, or at a dinner party with friends, coupling info on what you eat with where you eat it can bring another layer of insight to your eating (and spending) habits. Because any act of journal writing is entirely personal, though, exactly how you do this up to you. For example, you can get creative and combine aspects of food journaling with your personal diary or travel journal to keep a record that adds up to so much more than just what and how you eat.
• How you feel about eating: Whether it’s happy, sad, anxious, or excited, food almost always makes us feel something. Log your sentiments after each meal or snack, or after a full day of eating, to track how your feelings toward your habits change over time.
• Recipes: No matter if you’re an experienced chef or just starting out, maintaining a food journal can give you a place to build a library of all your cooking successes—and failures. Add recipes as well as what went right or wrong during the process, and you’ll have a repository of helpful info (and memories) to go back to whenever you like.
• Cost: Food and sustenance are, of course, an essential part of life. They’re also a critical component of every personal budget. A food journal, then, can serve as a useful tool not just for those seeking greater insight into their eating habits, but also those trying to trim a few bucks out of their budget. Add information on the cost of the food you eat as you log your journal and, in time, you will more easily be able to see where you might be exceeding your monthly food budget and quickly pinpoint areas for savings and improvement.

Food Journal Examples: Where to Keep Your Food Diary

Just like the contents of your journal, there’s a lot of flexibility when it comes to how and where to keep your food diary. Today, there is a wide range of apps available—those like MyFitnessPal, LoseIt, and MyPlate—that make it easy to log your eating as well as exercise habits, take notes, and track calories. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with sticking to the classic combo of pen and paper. Using a hard-copy food journal gives you tons of flexibility to build the food diary that works for you.

Meanwhile, food diarists looking to keep things simple and digital, while still retaining the customizability of a traditional paper journal, can start their food journals using food and nutrition templates available from Microsoft. Choose from readymade templates for meal tracking and planning in Microsoft Word, as well as diet and exercise logs in Excel that make it easy to graph and visualize your progress toward your goals.