Food Journals and Calorie Tracking

So why is keeping a food journal or calorie tracking so important? Because keeping a record of what you consume will tell you a lot about where your specific issue lie. Your calorie consumption might be fine and you need to increase your exercise, or you may find you need to cut back your daily calories with, or with out exercise.

Calorie tracking is a great way to monitor what you are putting in your body on a daily basis. Consider creating a food journal as well, in place of just tracking calories. Track what time you ate each item, how hungry you were at the time, how did you feel when you were eating each item, and how long you felt satisfied from what you ate.

This can help you get an even more in depth look at your habits and can really help break emotional eating cycles. The more you are aware of, the more you can fine tune and make changes where they are needed.

Tracking and logging, admittedly, are time consuming but it is definitely worth the effort, and I promise you will learn something about your eating habits you didn't know before. Honestly, I had no idea how many calories I consumed in an average day, until I spent two weeks keeping track and wow is it an eye opener.

There are some really great tools on the internet for tracking calories, or creating a food journal or log. Some websites offer printable pages for keeping logs, and some websites have fully interactive online calorie trackers that allow you to enter your calories and track your progress all in one place.

Here's a few websites that offer calorie tracking:


My Calorie Counter by Everyday Health

Calorie Count

My Pyramid

There's many options available online and I highly recommend checking out a few sites and trying one out for a while and see what you learn.

One more really great site for calorie tracking is Calorie King, they have an impressive database of nutrition facts for all sorts of foods, whole foods and pre-packaged and restaurant foods. They do offer paid programs and services for weight loss, but the actual food database is free to use and is a great resource.