Personal Food Journal: Dietary Habits and Nutritional Analysis

This assignment analyzes the student's experience with maintaining a food journal, detailing its impact on their understanding of dietary habits and nutritional intake. The student reflects on the benefits of the journal, highlighting how it illuminated their consumption of processed foods and irregular meal timings, prompting them to identify areas for improvement. The assignment explores how the journal aids in long-term dietary changes by enabling reflection on eating behaviors. The student discusses the initial challenges of maintaining the journal, including inaccurate entries, and how they overcame these issues. They also identify habit reversal, changing emotional perceptions of food, and rule setting as helpful strategies, with a particular emphasis on how changing emotional perceptions on food proved to be the most effective. The student concludes by expressing their intention to continue using a food journal beyond the assignment to track their progress and further improve their eating habits.

Running head: USAGE OF A FOOD JOURNAL
USAGE OF A FOOD JOURNAL
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author note:

1USAGE OF A FOOD JOURNAL
Question 1
A food journal implies the maintenance of a daily record which documents an
individual’s daily consumption of food throughout the day. Maintenance of a food journal has
been proven to be beneficial in enlightening individuals on the nutritional adequacy of their food
habits and the efficiency with they are following a balanced diet or consuming nutritionally
imbalanced foods in excessive amounts (Cordeiro et al., 2015). Considering the same,
maintaining a food journal has helped me to a great extent since it has informed me on how
frequently I consume processed food and maintain long intervals between my meals. Hence, by
highlighting the same, my food journal has helped me to identify the dietary habits which I must
change to ensure optimum nutritional status.
Question 2
Since a food journal helps to keep a record and track daily intake of food and the dietary
or food choice habits one engages in, it is also helpful in ensuring long term chances in
individuals in terms of their effort to maintain balanced nutritional intake of food. By keeping a
record of the food items and meal timings followed by an individual, a food journal allows the
individual to review and reflect on the efficiency with he or she is successfully implementing or
adhering to health and food intake behavior change (DeBiasse et al., 2018). Hence, considering
the same, a food journal will be helpful to me to a great extent in the future since it will inform
me every day on whether I am working hard enough to reduce processed food consumption or
maintain my meal timings, by keeping a track of my daily eating habits.

2USAGE OF A FOOD JOURNAL
Question 3
Upon maintaining a regular food journal entry and later the reviewing the same at the end
of the day, I was quite surprised at how unaware I have been till now on my harmful and
nutritionally inadequate food habits. Since I reflected on my food journal every day, my entries
greatly influenced my food choices in the following days since I truly wished that my journal
reflected healthy food choice in the future. In the initial days however, I was quite surprised at
my tendency to fill incorrect food entries. However, it has been evidenced that food journals are
often subject to incorrect entries due to bias and forgetfulness (Jacques et al., 2016). To combat
the same, I attempted to be true to myself, and fill my journal after every meal and reflect on the
same every day.
Question 4
The aspects of habit reversal, changing emotional perceptions on food and setting rules
have been helpful to a great extent, of which, changing emotional perceptions on food was the
most effective since it compelled me to view food from different aspects and appreciate food
beyond merely taste preferences. Practices of rule setting was common for me since my family
maintains strict meal timings and maintaining budgets during food purchasing.
Question 5
Beyond this class, I wish to continue my usage of a food journal in the future. This is
because, a food journal has proved to be highly motivating and informative for me in tracking
my daily food habits and my attempts to improve the inadequacies.

3USAGE OF A FOOD JOURNAL
References
Cordeiro, F., Bales, E., Cherry, E., & Fogarty, J. (2015, April). Rethinking the mobile food
journal: Exploring opportunities for lightweight photo-based capture. In Proceedings of
the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 3207-
3216). ACM.
DeBiasse, M. A., Bowen, D. J., Quatromoni, P. A., Quinn, E., & Quintiliani, L. M. (2018).
Feasibility and acceptability of dietary intake assessment via 24-hour recall and food
frequency questionnaire among women with low socioeconomic status. Journal of the
Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 118(2), 301-307.
Jacques, S., Lemieux, S., Lamarche, B., Laramée, C., Corneau, L., Lapointe, A., ... & Robitaille,
J. (2016). Development of a Web-based 24-h dietary recall for a French-Canadian
population. Nutrients, 8(11), 724.