Want to stop bingeing? Start tracking your meals

In my last post, I wrote about the benefits of journaling and how it can help you beat binge eating disorder. Today's post is about meal tracking and why it's one of the best and easiest ways to transition to healthy eating.

What is meal tracking? That's easy: it involves logging your daily eating patterns. It's not something you do obsessively, recording your meals down to the last crumb. It's important be honest about your eating habits, but details aren't necessary. A rough outline is fine. The name of the game is to get back to enjoying regular, everyday portions at regular, everyday mealtimes.

How does it work? I used a wall calendar with large squares for each day, an assortment of pens, markers and highlighters, and even some star stickers. This made meal tracking seem like a game. Every night, before I went to bed, I'd get out my supplies and calendar and make a quick record of my meals that day.

First, I'd write "B" for breakfast, "L" for lunch, "S" for snack and "D" for dinner in the day's square. Then, I'd write the number of blocks I'd eaten (a brilliant concept borrowed from Barry Sears and his book Enter the Zone)  next to each letter. For example, B 3, L 3, S 2, D 4. The total blocks I wrote in the lower left-hand corner. It looked like this:

Luckily, you can do the same thing and achieve great results without knowing anything about blocks. If you've eaten a normal-sized breakfast and lunch (the equivalent of my three blocks), give yourself a check next to the "B". If you ate more than you wanted to for your snack, but you didn't binge, you could give yourself an upward-pointing arrow (the equivalent of, say, my six blocks). If you don't want to think about what you put down the hatch at dinner but are acutely aware that it involved far too much ice cream, part of a jar of peanut butter and a package of cookies, use an "X" as shorthand for the binge.
 

Your goal is to finish the day without a single "X", at which point you can give yourself the satisfaction of highlighting the date in green. If you can get through an entire week without a single "X" -- seven beautiful green days -- you give yourself a star. And so on.

Naturalmente, you can go as high- or low-tech as you want with meal tracker.