Writing a diet journal for weight loss is a wonderful practice that can help you find clarity and reach your weight loss goals. But if you feel bored with it or find that you aren’t being completely open and honest, you may be doing it wrong. While there are no rules with journaling, you could be unintentionally taking away from the many benefits it provides you.
Click Here: Nutrition Tracking Made Easy5 Roadblocks That Stop A Diet Journal For Weight Loss
1. You Aren’t Enjoying the Process
Do you find journaling to be extremely tedious, boring, or just not beneficial to you at all? If so, this might come down to how you are journaling and what mindset you are in. Take a few minutes to meditate or practice mindfulness before you pick up your pen and start to write. Consider how you’re feeling in this moment, what you’re struggling with, what part of your life you are enjoying, and what your plans are. Get into a mindset of gratefulness, positivity, and kindness before you start writing.
2. You Keep Using it Like a Diary
While many people do actually benefit from using their diet journal just to write about their day, this isn’t the best option for everyone. Look at how you are journaling, and determine whether or not you’re actually digging deep or just using it like a diary, where you list what you did and ate today, and didn’t actually get to your thoughts or emotions.
3. You Never Have Anything to Say
If you feel like every time you open up your journal, you have nothing to say, there are a few quick ways to remedy this. The first way to fix this problem is to use journaling prompts. These are questions or statements that give you pointers to write about. These often lead to other ideas in your head about what you want to say in your journal.
Another option when you feel you don’t have anything to say is to make a list each day. It can change by the day, such as today writing down 3 of your best moments, then tomorrow write 5 goals you have for the next week.
4. Your Stress Has Increased Since Journaling
Journaling should be helping your stress, not making it worse! If you find it to be super stressful or the act of journaling is actually making things worse for you, it’s time to try and figure out why that is. Consider what you’ve been writing about, and whether or not you’re being kind to yourself. If every journal entry is a rant or negative, and you beat yourself up a lot, that is probably the cause. Try to write at least one positive thing about yourself and express gratitude in your journal.
5. You Find Yourself Holding Back a Lot
The reason you want to keep your journal to yourself is that holding back and not being open and honest with yourself really halts your progress. You need to be able to be candid if you want to find any sort of clarity. Journaling is a process and one that can do amazing things, but not if you find that you’re filtering out certain parts of your life because you fear who might find it one day.
Get Help With Your Diet Journal For Weight Loss
Diet journaling can help you to lose weight by giving you a better understanding of your relationship with food. You can easily monitor what you eat with an app like My Food Diary. It will help you to eat properly and be in control of your decisions, and by making healthy changes to your unhealthy habits you can lose all that weight and keep it off for a lifetime. Take the guesswork out of weight loss. Record your food and exercise, and My Food Diary will crunch the numbers for you.
