Tag: food journal

The Benefit of Review

What is the benefit of review? Many programs, professionals, or sites will suggest keeping a journal. I’ve done it here multiple times. While there is inherent benefit in writing things down, a journal offers much more when you take time to review it. Without review, you may miss a problematic food response, a pattern that is prolonged over so much time that it isn’t obvious, or you may fail to see the progress you’ve made.

Asian man at desk looking down at open book with pencil in hand and a cup of coffee in front of him.

The correct review schedule is the one that works for you. It will be best if you can find a time that you are rested and have few distractions. If you can only carve out small chunks of time, that’s okay. You don’t have to review a whole year at a time.

You may want to take a tiered approach. Perhaps do a monthly review, make note of anything that surprises you, that you’ve learned, and the progress you see. Save these notes and review them at the end of the year.

There’s no magic to monthly review. You know yourself best. If you need longer to settle into feeling comfortable recording things, you may want to wait 6 months or a year before reading what you’ve written. This will give you time to get in the groove of choosing the information you need to write down, determining what information you want to access later, and what it feels best to get off your chest and onto paper or a screen.

Years of schooling can make it seem like we should set out on a path with very specific goals and a narrow view of how we plan to achieve them. Without review that may not lead to success because we won’t see where we’re wasting time or spinning our wheels. Looking back can help us make the most efficient and effective adjustments.

Sometimes we resist looking back because we’re afraid we’ll focus on what hasn’t worked well or want to punish ourselves for not doing enough or being good enough. But what we’re really resisting is a chance to learn and improve.

More people than ever before are able to get our attention delivering expertise. They edit themselves to look perfect and perfectly confident. That doesn’t mean they haven’t worked hard, failed, reinvented, and revised before you even knew who they were. That’s how they became experts.

The most knowledgeable mechanic has learned the way to remove X before doing Y. The most knowledgeable plumber has learned from messy mistakes. The best lawyers review both their mistakes and those of others to determine the most effective tack to take in a given case.

Effective journaling and review will assure that you are an expert on your physical responses, feelings, and perceptions. This knowledge will help you ask better questions of your doctor, therapist, and even friends when you’re trying to plan. It will help you feel more grounded and stronger. And it can surprise you in the best ways!

We don’t always recognize the incremental steps we are making toward improvement. Seeing the results of those small steps become a big change over time can bring a sense of accomplishment and excitement to keep going.

I’ve written 727 blog posts that represent close to a million words. I’ve chosen over 1200 images to post along with those words. A words to pages calculator tells me that’s 83 hours and 20 minutes of content or the equivalent of 2062 single-spaced pages.

Even if I haven’t caught all the typos or chosen the most perfect words, I can’t look at those stats and say I haven’t accomplished something. And that’s the benefit of review.

Keeping Track

Finding a pattern requires keeping track. Identifying foods that irritate your system may involve a lengthy investigation. A fasting diet can help, but when issues linger after the primary culprits are eliminated, things get a little more complicated. Recording the foods you ingest each day can reveal unexpected patterns that can help.

It’s easy to think that we’ll remember what we’ve eaten without recording it. If you’ve ever been on a calorie-counting diet you probably know that’s rarely true. You simply have to write it down somewhere or you’ll miss some little something along the way.

When looking for irritants, you also need to record how you feel each day. Cross-referencing the two can bring the greatest insights.

It took me awhile to figure out Cheerios caused my dermatitis herpetiformis to flare because I was intermittently consuming another problem product that used optical sorting of oats. The effect of the combination was misleading at first, but watching the pattern over time helped me figure it out.

You don’t need anything fancy to keep track. A notepad and pen with some highlighters will do the trick. It’s more important to tailor your system to your habits. What will be the most accessible, easy, and least interruptive way to accomplish the task?

If you want the ability to sort the information in a variety of ways, consider a spreadsheet program. In a pinch, you can put each day’s meals into the notes app on your phone.

Beyond that, other diet apps can do double duty, helping you to see the nutritional composition of your diet or the number of calories consumed while also helping you keep track of what you’ve eaten. It will be best to choose an app that allows you to record how you feel as well as what you’ve eaten and has a way for you to easily recall or export a history.

If you want to reduce the typing, spend a couple of weeks creating a checklist of everything you eat. Let that be your master list so that you can just checkboxes on the list for each meal. It will be helpful to alphabetize the list and leave room for the date and notes on how you feel.

You can record symptoms after each meal or just in general for the whole day. Often symptoms will be delayed and impossible to relate to a specific meal so a daily recap can be effective.

Don’t just record expected symptoms. Note if you feel lethargic, fatigued, foggy, itchy, tight in your skin, or irritable when touched. These can all be early clues that occur before more significant symptoms. If there’s a pattern, eventually you’ll be able to see how quickly they appear after ingestion of certain foods.

Reviewing monthly and looking for patterns should be sufficient. If you find none, it’s okay. But when you do, every minute of time and effort will feel worth it. Any piece of the puzzle that lessens symptoms and improves how you feel is worth keeping track.

I’m Saying Cheerio to Cheerios®!