What to Look Out for in Your Food Diary
At the end of each day, take a look at your food diary to see exactly what you’ve eaten. Turn to Chapter 8 and see which list you’ve picked most of your foods from: ‘Foods you can eat’, ‘Occasional treats’ or ‘Foods to avoid’. It might help you to photocopy these pages for quick reference or mark them with a sticky note so you can quickly flip to them. Don’t be down if you’ve picked most from the ‘Foods to avoid’ list – that’s what happened to Nicki, too! The aim of this book is to show you how you can make choices from the ‘Foods you can eat’ list (plus occasional treats) without feeling like you’ve been hard done by.
After a few days, you may start to see patterns. Look for the following:
• Are you eating regularly?
• Are you eating at least five portions of fruit and veg a day?
• Are you having sweet snacks?
• Do you have sugary drinks (e.g. canned fizzy drinks)?
• Are you doing any exercise?
• How many hours do you spend watching TV each day?
It could well be that you start to see things in your eating habits that you never noticed before. With this information, you’ll start to build up a picture of how you eat, why you eat, when you eat and what bad habits you may have got into. Don’t worry – we’re going to help you put these right.
| TIME OF DAY | FOOD/DRINK | PHYSICAL SYMPTOMS | HOW YOU’RE FEELING | OTHER FACTORS |
| 8am | White baguette with cheese Plain croissant Cup of tea with sweetener | Full | A bit Tense | Big work day ahead – stress! |
| 10.30 am | Haven’t Eaten | Dizzy, Weak | Edgy! | |
| 11.15 am | Pick ‘n’ mix (two handfulls) | Full of Energy | Happy | |
| 11.30 pm | Tired | Edgy, A bit sad | ||
| 1 pm | Half a cheese Sandwich and cup of tea | Hungry, then full and bloated | A bit low (don’t like being bloated) | Didn’t have time for proper lunch |
| 2 pm | more Pick ‘n’ mix | Hunger pangs beginning | Happy | |
| 2.15 pm | Lacking Energy, headachey | Low | Doing a Workout | |
| 3.30 pm | Cup of tea Packet of crisps Kit-Kat | Hungry then full (but hungry again half an hour late | Grumpy! | |
| 7.30 pm | Salmon Steak, new potatoes, courgettes Yoghurt with fruit | Light-headed then properly full for the first time today | Contented | First proper meal for almost 12 hours |
| 9.30 pm | Bowl of porridge with sultanas | Peckish but not with a rumbling tummy! | Still feeling happy |
Nicki’s Diary: How She Used to Eat
Here’s an example of Nicki’s food diary to help you see how it might look. You’ll notice that in some boxes she puts just one word and in others she puts more. This is down to personal choice – do what you think will help you most.
The times listed reflect Nicki’s routine at the time. Yours might be different – for example, you might have breakfast at 6am or perhaps you don’t have it at all! If you skip a meal, you should still write it in because it will provide you with important information about how this makes you feel physically and emotionally. Don’t forget to put the date at the top of each diary day. And if you’re feeling lazy and are tempted to let the whole diary thing slip, remember this: weight management experts say that people who don’t keep a regular food diary don’t tend to lose weight. One study found that heavier women were also more likely to under-report their daily food intake than those who were lean, so if you’re reading this book to lose weight, the diary will help you stop kidding yourself about how much you’re eating!
From this we can see:
• When Nicki didn’t eat, she felt dizzy, weak and edgy.
• When she ate something really sugary, like pick ’n’ mix, she felt happy and full of energy. But just 15 minutes later, she felt tired, edgy and a bit sad (as soon as the sugar ‘high’ has worn off).
• When she didn’t eat a proper lunch, she needed another sugar lift within an hour, suggesting that her blood sugar levels were low. The result? She went for the sweets again.
• When she grabbed a lunch, it didn’t satisfy her for long and she ended up having crisps and chocolate to stave off her hunger mid-afternoon.
• It was only following a proper meal at 7.30pm that she felt ‘contented’ – and continued to feel happy a couple of hours later.
• We could also see that she wasn’t eating enough fruit and veg.
• On a more positive note, she was getting some exercise, wasn’t watching hours of telly and wasn’t having fizzy drinks.
This was Nicki’s eating regime before she started the Sugar Addicts’ Diet. By looking at this diary, Nicki was able to see exactly how the foods she ate affected her physically and emotionally. By filling in your own diary, you can do the same. You don’t have to do it forever, but try to keep it going for at least the 21 days of the plan.
Nicki says, ‘I’ve eaten like this for years, and until I wrote it down, I had no idea of how food could affect how I felt. Now I can see how certain foods affect me – for good and for bad – I can decide what to go for and what to avoid. I hate feeling ‘low’, ‘edgy’, ‘grumpy’ and all those other negative words. I only ever want to put positive words in the diary!’
Why Do I Need to Break My Addiction?
So you’re addicted to sugar – what’s the problem with that? Well, for starters, if you’re reading a book with the word ‘diet’ in the title, it’s likely