Track Your Food....Really

Track Your Food:  How do you know if you are hitting your nutritional targets if you are not tracking what you are eating?  You don't have to track for the rest of your life, just while you are trying to get down a different food lifestyle.  Unless you are tracking (and better yet planning ahead) your meals, you have no idea how close you are or are not to supportively eating.  It takes me all of 5 minutes to log my food for the day.  The hard part is starting this habit, but I can assure you it is so simple once it is a habit.  There are many free sites with databases of foods and the ability for you to track & plan your foods/meals.  The site that I began using in 2009 and absolutely love is sparkpeople.com.  SparkPeople has a huge database of foods (whole foods, prepackaged foods, restaurant foods), but also allows you to customize and build your own database of food choices, create a "favorites" food list so you are not always hunting for foods you eat frequently, allows you to create and store for later access whole meals that you eat frequently so you don't have to log in each food item every time, and even allows you to build recipes so you are aware of the nutritional breakdown of each serving.  Additionally, it allows you to modify your nutritional target ranges as well as add targets to track daily.  It is very user friendly and even has mobile apps for your smart phones, so it can be on the move with you.  However you journal, plan, track your food choices....Make the habit today for better results tomorrow!  ...See also these Post Links:  I Ate How Much?  &  Hows The Tracking?  &  The Importance Of Journaling