We all want to stay healthy and fit and live a long life. Some of us have ideal body weight, while some are overweight or even obese. It’s not like obese people like being fat all the time, but most of the time, they don’t have any motivation to exercise or eat more healthy food. These days when people put so much focus on being slim and healthy, there are many tools and techniques available that can actually help you lose weight and stay healthy and one such tool is the food diary. A food diary is like a journal in which you record each meal that you take for each day.
If you want to reduce your weight or to keep yourself physically fit, use a food diary template. A food diary template enables you to write all the items that you eat. By using it, you can check what is good for your health or what is not good. By using it, you can easily track all the calories and fats you take per day. A food diary template also helps you to identify food-causing allergies and illnesses.
Free Food Diary Templates:
Important Benefits of Keeping a Food Diary:
A food diary is very beneficial for everyone. By using it, you can easily make small changes to your diet to become healthy. To live a healthy life, it is very necessary to maintain a good diet. If you eat a lot outside of the home, it helps you to record the ingredients of each item in a well-managed way. So you can easily understand how many calories you have to take and how many calories you have to burn in a day. In a day, we have to perform many tasks and it is very difficult to keep an eye on what we are eating. Without a proper structure, no one can maintain a good diet.
1. Inform you What you Eat:
When it comes to keeping a food or meal diary, most people don’t think of this diary as a tool that shows them what they actually eat to be something useful. They always state that they know exactly what they eat and they can almost estimate the number of calories that they take each day. This might be true in some cases but mostly, we don’t know exactly how much we eat every day and how many calories we take in. Counting the exact calories is difficult because most of us don’t only just take 3 meals. We also have a habit of eating in between meals and those snacks are mostly highly packed with calories. Using a food diary to record each and every meal that you take can help you estimate the daily food intake at the end of the day with the exact consumption of calories.
2. Help you get Healthy:
At the end of each day usually at night, when you see your food diary and you evaluate the meals you took for the day along with the number of calories, it can help you estimate if you need to take fewer calories because you are trying to lose weight. Being overweight and being obese are two different things. Being overweight is not that alarming and you can just control your weight by taking careful meals and doing regular exercise. It is a whole different story. You need external help or some tool, i.e. food diary, to check how many calories you need and how much you take. This way, you can easily cut down on calories and carbohydrates gradually by recording your food intake daily.
3. Help you Plan Meals:
In the beginning, most people use food diaries to record their food and calorie intake, but with some time, you can actually use the same diary to manage and plan your meals ahead of time. With the diary in hand, you can check exactly how many calories you want to eat tomorrow or for each day of the next week, what your work routine will look like, and how much time you will have to prepare meals and snacks. This way, you can easily select the meals that are quick to make but don’t pack a higher number of calories.
4. Keep you focused on your Goals:
You might argue that how a diary can help you lose weight or stay healthy but there is a scientific fact that when you write a high-calorie food in your diary and at the end of the day you realize how many calories it had, you unintentionally try to control it or eliminate such food from next day’s meals. This is perhaps one of the most important benefits of keeping a food diary. It helps you stay focused and right on track to living a healthy and happier life by avoiding the same mistakes or carelessness in the future regarding calorie intake.
Nowadays, creating a food diary is very easy with the help of pre-formatted templates. There are many templates available on the internet that you can use to create a food diary. A pre-formatted template saves you time and effort. By using them, you can easily and quickly form a food diary in a matter of minutes. To help you out, we have listed below some free editable and customizable food diary templates.
