Keeping track of your diet and exercise progress and setbacks can benefit your program in a variety of ways. It will give you the chance to analyze your habits as you create a diet and exercise plan more in tune with your individual needs. It can also help you become more aware and accountable for your actions as you strive to lose weight. Before you begin your diet and exercise log, know what should be included and how to interpret that information for a more effective weight-loss plan.
Purpose
Diet journals and food diaries can help you become more aware of your efforts and improve on them daily. "Good Housekeeping" magazine notes that keeping a log or diary of the foods you eat can help you gain a clearer picture of your actual caloric intake throughout the day, while giving you an in-depth look at when and why your diet fails. It can help you stay accountable for daily exercise and allow you to see when you feel best after exercising, and when you feel tired and discouraged. These can all be used to analyze your habits for more effective and individualized weight loss.
Type
Technology affords you more than just a plain journal to track your weight loss. Websites such as The Daily Plate and Fit Day give you the tools to track your weight loss, diet and exercise online, doing all of the caloric calculations for you. These can be helpful if you're near a computer much of the day, since it's simple to log in and add foods and detail workouts. If you're not near a computer, a daily planner or lined notebook can still be an excellent way to track your diet and exercise. Use one page per day to give yourself enough room to be thorough.
Details
Your diet and exercise log will only be as effective as the details that you enter into the journal. If you're vague and forget days, your log won't be an effective tool in personalizing your weight-loss plan. It's important that you include what you ate, the serving size and caloric content, how you felt when you ate and when you ate. Be as descriptive as possible, suggests the UCLA Health System. When filling out the exercise portion of the log, detail the exercise you did, the time of day, the number of reps and how you felt.
Analysis
Once you've kept your diet and exercise log for a few days, you'll begin to see patterns emerge, notes the website for the American Academy of Family Physicians. You might see that at 2 p.m. each day, you're prone to eating sugary snacks. Or, you may find that you feel more tired when you exercise at night. Use your details to help you create a more effective workout and diet plan for yourself. If you're prone to diet failure in the late afternoon, pack a healthy snack to ward off cravings. If you feel tired after late workouts, rearrange your schedule so you can exercise earlier. These personalizations can make your diet a success.
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