Keeping a food diary - how to reduce your calorie consumption

Now that you've got a week's worth of calorie information in your food diary you'll be able to easily see what needs to change!

In our example food diary, where we've changed to lower calorie options, the changes are shown in green with the previous calorie levels in red.

We've saved 1085 calories! This is simply by swapping low calorie options for the drinks and replacing sugary snacks with fruit and cutting down to one bag of crisps a day.

Of course this is just an example, your situation may be vastly different, maybe you don't drink alcohol, don't take sugar and don't eat lunch but it does show how a food diary can highlight eating issues and show you how easy it can be to reduce your calorie intake.

You can then go on to look at the changes you can make to what you eat to cut the calories down - whatever diet you choose to use a food diary is a useful aid in slimming.

The most important thing is not to cheat when filling in your diary - make sure you write down everything!

Back to Part 1 of Keeping a food diary

The above calorie counsumed table is an approximation and your actual calorie requirement depends on your health, metabolism and build.