Today I made a small change in my life–I decided to start a food journal. I had been doing My Fitness Pal for a little bit but I dislike having to input all my foods–it’s time consuming and irritating. I know it saves my food but I have a lot of new foods I eat on a consistent basis, so I am adding new things all the time and I don’t always know its properties. So today I decided to use diary that was given to me as a gift a little bit ago and have named it My Fucking Brutal Food Diary. Why? Because I am not going to sugar-coat this fucking diary. I am going to balls-to-the-walls honest in this thing. And I am going to see my patterns and work on one thing at a time. Maybe it will be my afternoon sweet snack or my evening dessert. I am aware.

So here is what happened my first day of writing in this–I had a hot chocolate in the afternoon to soothe my sore throat and on my way home I was kind of tempted to stop at Starbucks but because I had written the hot chocolate in my diary I was aware I had already had a drink with too much sugar and thus didn’t add to it. Talking about a journal #win!! I am surprised it started to work today. I mean I have read all these articles that go on and on about how writing down what you eat helps keep you in check, but I never had it work for me, so I simply thought it was all bullshit. I was doing this just to see what would happen.

For those that don’t know about the benefits of tracking what you eat, WebMD says it best:

For one thing, keeping a food diary instantly increases your awareness of what, how much, and why you are eating. This helps you cut down on mindless munching…Food diaries also help people identify areas where they can make changes that will help them lose weight…for example…people don’t realize how many calories they are obtaining from caloric beverages and snacks, and these can be easy interventions … that can help reduce calories.

Several studies have shown that people who keep food journals are more likely to be successful in losing weight and keeping it off. In fact, a researcher from one recent study says that people keeping a food diary six days a week lost about twice as much weight as those who kept food records one day a week or less.

As I alluded to before, I felt all of this before was bullshit. I think all I needed was the right medium. An inspirational diary. One that I felt safe writing in, that won’t be seen by others unless I want them to see it. And I won’t have to count every little item in the food, as that is tiring. Nope. At most I am going to write how I feel after eating it and look for small things to change.

I hope you liked the pictures of my journal, they are pretty bad-ass, if I do say so myself 😉