Free Food Journal Template

Why keep a food journal?

Writing down what you eat is one of the most reliable habits for losing weight and understanding your eating. In a well-known Kaiser Permanente study of nearly 1,700 adults, people who kept daily food records lost about twice as much weight as those who didn't. The journal doesn't need to be perfect. The act of noticing what you eat changes what you eat.

How to use a food diary for weight loss

A food diary helps with weight loss in three ways. It shows you where your calories really come from, it makes you pause before eating on autopilot, and it gives you something concrete to change. To get the most from it:

1. Set a daily calorie goal with the calorie deficit calculator and write it at the top of each page.
2. Log everything for two weeks, including drinks, snacks, cooking oil and weekend meals. Those are where most "mystery" calories hide.
3. Look for your biggest three sources of extra calories, like a daily latte, evening snacking or large dinner portions.
4. Change one of them at a time and keep logging, so you can see the effect on your weekly average and on the scale.

Which template should you use?

• Daily food journal. Log each meal with the time, food, amount, calories and protein, plus how hungry you were before and how full after. Best for the first few weeks, when you're learning your habits.
• Weekly summary. One line per day for calories, protein, water, exercise and energy. Best once you know roughly what you eat and want to spot patterns, like weekends running high.
• Meal prep planner. Plan every meal for the week and turn it into a shopping list. Best if you cook in batches or want fewer "what's for dinner?" decisions.

Pick a template above, then print it, save it as a PDF from the print dialog, or download it as a spreadsheet for Google Sheets, Numbers or Excel.

How to use a food journal well

1. Write it down as you eat, or straight after. Memory is bad at portions and forgets snacks entirely.
2. Be specific about amounts. "Pasta" is hard to learn from. "2 cups spaghetti with 1/2 cup meat sauce" is useful.
3. Include drinks, oil and sauces. They are the calories people most often leave out.
4. Rate hunger and fullness. It shows whether you're eating from hunger, habit or boredom.
5. Review once a week and change one thing at a time, not everything at once.

Paper or app?

Paper is great for awareness and needs no setup. Its weakness is maths: working out calories by hand takes time, and most paper journals get abandoned within a few weeks for that reason. An app does the adding up for you. Bento Bunny works like a food journal that fills itself in: snap a photo or type what you ate, and it records the calories and macros. Many people start on paper and switch once the habit sticks.

Need help with the numbers? Use the daily calorie calculator to set your calorie goal, and the recipe calorie calculator for homemade meals.