How to keep a diet diary

A diet diary here is a written record of what you ate and how you felt, kept in the same diary as everything else. It is not a calorie counter, and it is not a plan for losing or gaining weight. If writing down food makes you anxious, you can stop. A diary should not be another thing to fail at.

One entry, the day you ate it

Write it the same day, even roughly. Memory of meals is worse than people think: by tomorrow the Tuesday lunch has become "something with rice." Put the day in the title, or tag the entry #food, so these do not get lost among ordinary notes.

A useful entry is short:

• What you ate, in ordinary words. "Toast and eggs," not a spreadsheet.
• Roughly when, if the timing matters to you.
• Where, and whether you were hungry, bored, rushed, or sitting with someone.
• How you felt afterward. Energy, stomach, mood. One line.

You can skip amounts. You can skip entire days. A week with four notes is a record. A blank day is not a failure.

What you are looking for

Read a week back and see if anything repeats. Lunch at your desk and a headache. A late meal and a bad night. Eating with people and enjoying it more. Those are observations, not a diagnosis and not a rule. If you want to change something, change one thing and write down what happened. Leave the rest of your diet alone until you know whether that one thing mattered.

This kind of note is also something you can show a doctor or a dietitian if you are already working with one. The diary does not replace them, and it will not tell you what you should weigh.

Keep it to yourself

Food entries get personal quickly, and they are easy to write in a way you would hate to have read back to you. Leave the diary private. You do not owe anyone a log of your meals. How that switch works is in how to keep a private diary.

Thursday. Breakfast skipped, coffee only, because I was late. Lunch was a cheese sandwich at the desk, too fast. By four I was irritable and ate a bun I did not really want. Dinner was soup at home, normal, and I felt fine an hour later. The bun was the bored part, not the hungry part.

That is the whole method. What you ate, when it stopped being hunger, and how the afternoon felt. For days that are not about food, what to write in a diary has other ways in.