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Food Diary Rules For Success

Understand your energy balance!

Nutracheck sets you personal daily targets. Start keeping your private online food diary today. Learn how much energy your body needs. Then armed with this knowledge, you can lose weight!

How to make your Food Diary work

The secret of success is no lying! No one else sees you food diary, so the more honest you can be, the more it will help you. Choose your start day and then just log in as many times as you need to and update your food diary. Here are 5 tips for getting started with your food diary:

Check how your diet measures up

Firstly enter your profile - only takes a couple of minutes! This will set your daily calorie and fat targets. It is helpful to actually understand how much more you are eating than you really should be. So for a couple of days, you may wish to not make any changes to your diet and just enter everything you eat and drink. You might find for example that you are typically eating 2,500 calories per day and your target is 1,500. This will help you start to understand what changes you need to make. Then pick a start date and start keeping your food diary, making sure you stick to your calorie target.

Enter everything

Don't forget spread on bread, sugar in drinks, salad dressings, gravy or snacks you eat on the go. And if you're a 'picker', record it - everything counts! Your food diary may show you that this is all you need to cut out to lose weight).

Do it immediately

Don't try and remember everything until the end of the day - this is where our mobile phone service comes in handy. You have the option to download your food diary onto your mobile. Enter everything you eat into your mobile, then 'synchronise over the air' to update your online food diary. So there's no excuse not to keep track even if you are away from your PC.

Measure amounts

It might sound tedious but it's really important - especially at the start - to measure portion sizes and educate yourself about the calories in a serving. Some foods are not easy to guess; always weigh (at least once) breakfast cereals, unsliced bread, pasta, rice and potatoes. A 30g serving of breakfast cereal is probably not as much as you think. And a jacket potato may be 'healthy' but the calories can soon tot up if it's a large one.

Change your thinking!

Success is in your head! Do not think that you are 'dieting' (negative connotations), but instead making a positive change to start eating more healthily to be kinder to your body and feel better. Losing weight is natural benefit of this. Keeping a food diary will encourage you to make conscious choices about what you eat - and entering it gives you the chance to think twice before you act, which is one of the most useful things you can do to help you control your weight. Plus because the food diary approach is flexible - one bad day does not mean you've blown your diet - an important psychological benefit! Keep a focus on the overall week - if you go over your daily calorie target on one day, simply adjust what you eat and increase your activity for the rest of the week and you can still lose weight.