Why Are Food Journals A Crutch

A lot of diet experts recommend food journals.

I don’t.

Here is why.

Chronic dieters use food journals to supplant their own hunger and non hunger signals.

Instead of figuring out if they are hungry, they look at their food journal and count up the calories or points.  Then if, they have not eaten their daily allotment of calories, they eat something.  If they have already eaten the days rations, they don’t.

Think what this does to you over time.  It makes you disassociate normal biological eating and non eating cues with a numbers on a piece of paper.

Your body is different every day, though.  You may need more food on Wednesday because you worked out hard on Tuesday.  Or you may need less on Sunday because you just laid around on Saturday.

It is fine and normal to have varying energy needs from day to day.  And your food journal doesn’t reflect that.

Food journals are just another way that the diet promoters get you to feel like you need help to know what to eat.  And this “need” has created a market place for all those diet programs.

Stop writing down what you have eaten and you have to rely on listening to your body for clues.  That seems scary, just like giving up the scale, “How am I suppose to know what or how much to eat, or whether or not I have been good?”

Well this is the key.  You have to start listening and paying attention to your body because the crutch of a food journal and scale are gone…