I would like to share two Printable Food Journal for the Weight Loss with you. These daily food journal sheets will help you make better decisions about what you eat, and help you stay focused on reaching your weight loss goals. Printable Food Journals are also an excellent tool for tracking your progress toward your goals.
Free Printable Food Journal For Weight Loss Pdf
A daily food diary is a short-term tool to help you record your food intake and give your healthcare practitioner insight into what you eat, how you eat, and when you eat it. This information contains valuable clues that can help create a tailored eating plan for your needs.
A food journal is a useful tool for improving your health. It is a tool you can use to track what you eat at every meal. Keeping a food diary allows you to:
- Become more accountable for your eating habits
- Identify your motivation for eating
- Focus on your nutritional requirements
- Know your food triggers, such as for pinpointing allergies
- Keep track of calories for weight loss/gain goals
- Eat more healthily
The following guide questions can help make food journaling accurate and successful:
1. What did I eat? – You can write down the types of food you’ve eaten in a meal, and the beverages you’ve consumed. You may also include the kind of food preparation (fried, broiled, etc.) and the condiments used, if any.
2. How much have I eaten? – Record the amount of food you’ve consumed in the measurement system you’re familiar with (e.g., cups, ounces, tablespoons). For extra accuracy, weighing your food before consuming it is a good practice.
3. When did I eat? – Logging the time when you ate is helpful if you’re keeping track of your eating habits. For example, if midnight snacks are a constant part of your bedtime routine, this may be causing problems for your weight-loss goals.
Side bar: One simple health habit you can build is to drink this superfood green drink, which gives you a boost of energy and supplies your body with the nutrients it needs to get through the day.
1. My Daily Food Journal
If you’re looking for a food journal that helps you become more mindful at every meal, this template we’ve designed might just be the thing you need. It features a predominantly yellow-and-blue theme, with spaces allocated for keeping a record of every meal for each day the week.
You can also highlight which meals left the best or the worst impression on you through the spaces allocated for “Most Favorite Meal” and “Least Favorite Meal.” At the bottom of the page is enough space for making notes about your weekly meal experience.
2. My Daily Food Planner
Our Daily Food Planner encourages healthy eating. Space is allocated for your goal, where you can write down what you’re aiming for when it comes to meal prep, health, and nutrition.
We’ve designed this template not only to keep track of your daily meals, but also to encourage users to try a variety of dishes through the space labeled “Food I Should Try,” Conversely, the space “Food I Should Avoid” highlights dishes that might cause allergies or other adverse reactions and should be avoided by the user.
3. My Food Diary
The CDCP supports people in their efforts to embrace a healthy lifestyle. They have made a simple food diary with enough spaces for users to record their food intake for the whole week.
Each day of the week features a pastel color scheme, and has slots for you to write down or type in the food you’ve eaten for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There are also three slots for snacks for each day of the week. The diary is in PDF format and downloadable for free from their website.
4. Weekly Food Journal
This food journal has ample space for you to list all the types of foods consumed in a week, as well as a tracker for daily water intake. It has a charming design, and to further motivate you, there is an area to write down your motivational quote for the week.
The journal also has spaces reserved for your weekly measures and goals, as well as for the exercises (with duration and calories burned) you’ve done for every day of the week.
5. Daily Food and Activity Diary
This food journal helps you track your food intake and physical activities for the entire week.
Although there are several ways for you to lose weight, health care experts recommend a combination of a healthy diet and sufficient regular physical activity. At least 2.5 hours of moderately intense aerobic exercise each week is both beneficial and safe for most people.
6. Rainbow Theme Weekly Food Journal
If you prefer a festive theme for your food journal, you might consider adopting this template’s design. This tracker features a space for your weekly goals, statistics and notes, and motivational quotes to get you going.
7. Food Diary and Nutrient Tracker
In addition to logging the food you consume, this template provides spaces for tracking the amount of fats, protein, carbs, and calories in every meal. Formulas for calculating the caloric content of food items are also provided.
This tracker was developed by health and nutrition coach Suzanne Hiscock, owner of FitWatch. Through her site, she has provided support for people’s health and fitness journeys.
8. Monthly Food Tracker
This food tracker is ideal for those who want to keep a record of the types of food they are consuming. There are several reasons for doing this.
For some, it ensures that they are taking the right kinds for food—especially for someone who has a health condition that needs specific kinds of nutrients only available from certain food products. For others, it might be a way of tracking how much junk food they consume in a month, giving them accurate information on whether or not they need to cut back on chips or soda.
9. Cute Meal Tracker
If you love customizing your trackers, here is a sample for inspiration. This spread was created on a dot-grid notebook using printable stickers.
If you like this sample, you might want to check out the inspiring bullet journal layouts in this post.
How to keep a food diary
1. Figure out your goal: what will the food diary help you achieve?
2. Set an end date: your food diary has a goal, it’s not a lifestyle.
3. Don’t wait, record your food intake immediately or you’ll forget.
4. Be consistent and record everything you eat and drink.
5. Be honest about your food intake and don’t feel bad about it.
6. Show it to a dietitian or nutritionist to get expert dietary advice.
Keeping a food diary can be very simple. Choose the most basic printable food diary options for short-term purposes. Alternatively, download an app that takes into account many metrics and data from other sources (like fitness apps) if you’re trying to find answers to complex health problems like digestive symptoms.
CDC Food Diary (hyper-basic)
America’s Centers For Disease Control is a reputable source of information and guidance for public health, including healthy eating and obesity prevention. They developed a very basic weekly food diary template that you can print off and fill in.
Pros: This A4 printable food diary sheet structures your daily eating habits. It includes a line for three meals and three snacks. It’s free, uncomplicated, and you only need to print one per week.
Cons: There is only one line for each meal and snack, and that can limit how much you can fit on the food diary sheets. There’s no place to put portions or serving size, time of day, or extra lines for unplanned snacks.
Harvard Health food diary (comprehensive)
Harvard Health is an excellent source of plain and simple health and nutrition advice backed by science. Their food diary printable template allows you to track the time and place of when you ate, hunger, mood, and servings of fruit and vegetables.
Pros: This comprehensive log starts with a sample food diary to show you how to fill it in. It allows you to track hunger and mood to identify behaviours and bad habits that you can address to improve your diet, like mindless eating in front of the TV and stress eating.
Cons: If you don’t fill it out immediately after eating, then you might miss out on important information. It’s very comprehensive, which can be tiresome to fill out and it has a coloured background, which can drain printing cartridges.
Food diary for gut health
If you’re having digestive problems, then you are not alone. In fact, about 40% of people worldwide meet the criteria for a functional gastrointestinal disorder (symptoms with no obvious cause). Sadly, digestive problems are hard to diagnose and treat — this is where a food diary can help.
Atlas microbiome food diary
If you’ve taken the Atlas Microbiome Test, then you get free access to a photo food diary that allows you to snap a pic of your meals. This healthy food diary rates your meal based on if it’s good or bad for the good bacteria in your gut. It’s available for Android and iOS.
A 2020 study confirms that food photo diaries are the best option for food tracking because they are much more precise. It takes the burden off of you to log every ingredient or weigh your meals, and it provides an archive of relevant dietary information for your nutritionist.
Pros: It’s quick, easy, and free if you’ve taken our test. It uses reliable scientific evidence to rate how microbiome-friendly your food choices are. It includes a free rainbow food tracker that helps you diversify your diet for gut and whole-body health. Plus, your nutritionist can access your food and see your pics to help you with your gut health goals.
Cons: You can only use it if you’ve taken the Atlas Microbiome Test. It’s very much focused on optimising your gut microbiome to enhance your wellbeing, so it doesn’t give you information about calories or allow you to integrate fitness data.
IBS food diary: MySymptoms
MySymptoms is the best food diary app for tracking digestive symptoms caused by irritable bowel syndrome, food sensitivities, and intolerances, as well as inflammatory bowel disease. It is a data-driven app that maps your food intake and your symptoms to identify trigger foods and situations. It includes sleep and stress ratings, bowel movements, and symptom intensity.
Pros: This app records data and generates charts to help find what’s triggering your episodes of digestive comfort. It’s a real food and symptom diary that tracks lots of different metrics, not just food, to give a broad picture of how your life is interacting with your gut health. You can also generate food diary pdf reports.
Cons: MySymptoms finds associations between different factors, but it doesn’t provide causal relationships. For example, this food symptom diary might find a relationship between a bad night’s sleep and your symptoms, but what if something else actually disturbed your sleep and caused the symptom? This is worth bearing in mind.
Healthy food diary app: Eat the rainbow
Eat The Rainbow is a great healthy food diary that doesn’t focus on calories. Instead, it’s designed to encourage people to diversify their diet using colourful plant foods. It comes with a comprehensive list of healthy foods to eat and it allows you to set weekly goals.
Pros: This simple and uncomplicated app wants to help you eat better. It also wants to educate you with references to the scientific facts that support eating the rainbow for health. The list of colourful plant foods is great inspiration to get in the kitchen and start cooking.
Cons: It’s a pretty basic app that doesn’t allow you to take photos of your food. It can’t be integrated with other sources of data for enhanced results on how you’re helping your body.
Food diary book: The Gut stuff
The Gut Stuff was started by DJs-turned-gut-aficionados, the Mac Twins. They travel the UK, organising events, discussions, and dinner clubs dedicated to gut health and gut-friendly foods. As part of their ambition to make gut health a hot topic of debate in the UK, they’ve released the cutest food diary out there.
Pros: It allows you to track hydration, mood, symptoms, and food intake. The book includes awesome gut health tips to help you make better choices for your digestive health every day. And let’s face it, it just looks like a great birthday or Christmas gift.
Cons: It’s a beautifully printed book that you’ll need to carry around with you if you want to log food, mood, and water intake correctly. While it may suit the purposes of a nutritionist as a food tracker, it’s not a flexible tool that will do calculations for you or integrate data from other sources.
Food diary for weight loss
A food diary can support weight loss as part of a structured plan overseen by your doctor or dietitian for diseases like type II diabetes and obesity. Recording information like your mood, hunger levels, and eating context (stress eating, mindless eating, binge eating) is especially important because they provide valuable information about the role of food in your life.
However, there are limitations and risks. For example, studies show that people tend to underreport what they’ve eaten and overestimate the portions of healthy food. Plus, food diaries can be triggering for people with a history of eating disorders.
It’s essential to evaluate why you want to lose weight because there are plenty of bad reasons to go on a diet. Hollywood, Instagram, and smartphone filters have created unattainable physical goals by promoting celebrities that are underweight (or look like they are). If this is your aim, consider talking to a nutritionist about your health goals to set realistic aims that won’t take a toll on your health.
Weight loss food tracker: Noom
Noom is an all-encompassing food and exercise diary app that allows you to log what you’ve eaten, your weight, and physical activity. It offers support from wellness coaches (which are not as qualified dietitians!) and has good reviews.
In fact, one 2016 study in Nature, a reputable science journal, found that it was an effective weight loss app for the majority of its users. For an expert opinion, check out this detailed Noom review by registered dietitian, Nora Minno.
Pros: Noom doesn’t force you to adopt a strict diet, and it doesn’t promote fad diets like keto or gluten-free. Foods are simply colour-coded: green for good, and red for not-so-healthy foods. It can connect to your smartphone’s health app to integrate data from your workouts.
Cons: It’s expensive — the full Noom program costs £41.99 per month. Plus, Noom isn’t designed for people with diagnosed health conditions, so if you have diabetes or thyroid problems, you should consult your doctor or a dietitian first.
I Have a Food Diary, Now What?
When you’ve successfully kept a food diary for at least a week, it’s time to review how you did in terms of food consumption, and to see if there is any pattern to it.
Do you tend to eat a lot of sweets when you’re feeling low? A food diary with a mood tracker can help you detect this tendency.
Are you eating enough fruits and vegetables?
Are you hitting your macros and micros while doing a keto diet?
Did you get off track from your whole-food, plant-based diet at a family picnic?
Your food journal can help provide the big picture. This information can help you make the right decisions and choose the best course of action to take when it comes to your overall health and well-being.
Furthermore, the information you log will be of great help to your dietician or nutritionist, allowing them to plot a course of treatment or support for your specific needs.
In Conclusion
A food journal provides information about the food you eat, and can help you live a healthier life.
If it shows that there are areas to improve in your eating habits, you will be in a better position to enact the necessary changes.