I thought I’d share with you how I have been keeping track of what I eat lately. Most people probably don’t need to track their food but it can be helpful in a number of instances. The first of which is when one is trying to lose weight and change old habits. I follow the Trim Healthy Mama lifestyle of eating. It is a low glycemic approach to eating. One of the big points of this way of eating is to not eat more often than every three hours, so my food log only needs room for about 5 things eaten each day.

Since I use a bullet journal I decided it would be a good place to keep the log. I’m not big into pre-planned pages so this went a little against my grain in the beginning but I needed it to be easily read. I attempted something a little differently with my first week of logging my food and it was a jumbled mess. It was only useful as a log not as any kind of idea bank for future menus. See!

I added some thin washi tape around it when I was prettying up my pages. See, I fill may pages in very sparsely when I create them and then go back and pretty them up later when I have time and desire to do something crafty. If I tried to make my pages pretty from the outset, I’d never get them done.

So what I did next was create a place to put the food eaten. This is what it looks like on the first few days of the week.

I don’t really care if I make mistakes on my lines. The important thing is to get it there so that I can have it to use without fuss. I’ll pretty it up later, maybe.

I like to write down what “fuel type” it is too, so I can see if I’m shuffling it enough. For the longest time I was having nearly all “S” foods for breakfast every morning (that would be mostly eggs but even most of our pancakes are in the fats category). I’ve since added an oatmeal that I love and really enjoy–now if I can just make it so it is still hot when I eat it. (Oatmeal is an “E” fuel type, a good healthy starch that energizes the body.)

This log helps me see what we’ve actually eaten and when, as opposed to a menu plan that shows what I’m planning to eat throughout the week. I don’t know if it works the same for you, but I seldom follow a plan exactly as written; I end up changing it somewhere along the line. Last night was one such instance. I thought I had another chicken breast in the freezer but I had unexpectedly used it for Michael’s dinner on Sunday–we had pork carnitas and at present he doesn’t eat pork, so I fixed him some chicken carnitas. So last night’s dinner had to change; thankfully I have a freezer with lots of meats in it.

Here is what my food log looks like after being filled in.

I don’t always write it down when I eat it, so sometimes there are blanks where I couldn’t remember what I had. But the goal is to fill it in as I eat it. The colors have absolutely no meaning. I like color and change use whatever color I’m feeling like using at the moment. I’m not worried about colors that go together so much, just what I want to use.

This food log is also helpful in making menus. I can look back and remind myself of what we’ve eaten to get ideas for what to put on the menu for a different week. I can also see how long it has been since we’ve eaten a particular recipe.

I don’t use a whole page for the food log and put a little tracker on the lower portion of the page, and leave space to make notes and items I want/need to make or bake.

The one above was last week’s log. I made a big list of items to make or bake near the end of the week, so I’ll be pulling from that list over the next week or so.

I hope this look into my bullet journal and food tracking has been helpful to you in some way. There is no right or wrong way to use a bullet journal. Some people use them more as a scrapbook and other’s use it more for a planner. Part of mine is to help me in my weight loss journey. If you have questions, I’ll try to help.

Until next time, God bless,

 
Michele ºÜº