Food diary
A food diary is a record of everything eaten over a period, kept on paper or in an app; its value comes from consistency and honesty rather than from the precision of any single entry.
A food diary does two things at once, and people usually only notice the first. It produces a calorie total. It also makes you aware of what you are eating at the moment you eat it, which changes behaviour on its own — the effect shows up even when nobody adds anything up.
What makes one useful
Completeness matters more than accuracy. A diary missing the oil, the chai sugar and the two biscuits at four o'clock is not a slightly imperfect record; it is wrong by several hundred calories, which is the entire size of a typical deficit.
Timeliness matters nearly as much. Logging at the meal is reliable; reconstructing the day at bedtime is a memory test, and memory reliably forgets in one direction.
What it is not
It is not a report card and it is not a confession. A day logged honestly at 3,000 kcal is more useful than a day logged flatteringly at 1,800, because only one of them can be acted on.
When to stop
Most people do not need to log forever. A few months builds an internal sense of what portions cost, after which many switch to logging only during a deliberate fat loss phase, or only the meals they find hardest to judge.
स्रोत
- 1.Weight management — NIDDK, National Institutes of Health
- 2.Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2020–2025 — USDA and HHS
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