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Right now I'm tracking everything I eat in my food diary to really get a good overview of my diet. Sure I'm a nutritionist but we can always do with a bit of dietary 'tune-up' just like everyone else. Food diaries are a great way to track our food intake and identify any dietary problems, if you haven't read my previous blog about starting to change dietary behaviour and downloaded your FREE food diary there is no time like the present - stop what you're doing and get your food diary now, then read on...
How To Problem Solve And Fix Bad Food Habits - Use Your Food Diary
Once you've got a few days of your food diary completed its time to start looking at:
- What and how you're eating
- Identify any dietary habits that need improvement
- Consider the cause of the problem, develop a strategy to fix it and set a goal to achieve
- Give your new dietary approach a go
- Then reassess how your strategy went and refine it necessary.
Dietary Problem Solving Example
1. You keep a food diary for a week and notice that every day at around 3pm you buy a chocolate bar from the snack machine at work and eat the whole thing (you've identified a dietary problem).
2. In your diary you've noted that you are feeling really ravenous before you've eaten the chocolate bar (you've identified the circumstance this dietary problem occurs in).
3. You consider possible causes for this problem:
* Maybe you didn't eat enough at lunch-time? You could try adding a piece of fruit to your lunch to see if that reduces your 3pm cravings.
* When you consider the problem more, you realise you normally feel comfortably full after your lunch, so perhaps planning for a regular, healthy snack break at 3pm (to stave off the chocolate fix) would be a better idea.
You decide to trial the healthy snack break at 3pm and plan to take healthy foods to work for it. So you set a goal of reducing your chocolate bar consumption to two or less bars per week, rather than your current five (you've considered the cause of the problem and decided on a strategy to fix it).
4. You trial your strategy by taking healthy snack foods like fruit and low-fat yoghurt to work every day for afternoon tea (strategy trialled with goal in mind).
5. You find your chocolate bar consumption reduces without too much hassle and discover the only days you end up having a chocolate bar are the days you forget to take healthy snacks to work. You decide to take all your snacks on Monday for the whole week so you don't ever forget on odd days again (you've learnt from your mistake and refined your strategy).
Where To From Here?
So now we've learnt how to self-monitor our food intake using a food diary and how to problem solve dietary issues. In my next blog posting I'll consider how we can prevent some dietary problems from occurring by looking more closely at their cause - certain situations increase the risk of bad eating habits, so we'll look at what these situations are and work out how to prevent it from happening... because prevention is always better than struggling with willpower when we're ravenous.
Improve Your Eating Habits Now
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