Use a Diet Log to Track the Foods You are Eating

A diet log book is very important when it comes to your weight lifting diet.

Without a log book, you will have no idea what you've been eating or how many calories you've been eating.

How will you know when to increase or decrease the calories you've been eating?

You will be hit or miss when trying to meet your goals. You could get lucky and eat the right amount, but that's more like the odds of hitting the lottery.

If you really want to lose fat and build muscle, you will need to keep track of the calories you eat for each and every meal of each and every day.

I know so many people who are trying to build muscle that eat as much as they can for every meal. This is a good way to build muscle, but you'll also gain tons of fat this way.

Why gain all that fat when all you have to do is count the calories you eat and adjust them as you go? And the same goes for people trying to lose weight. Why lose so much muscle in the process? Use calories to control all of this.

Why Take The Chance And Guess?

Don't be one of those people that stay the same year after year because they eat the same year after year. You're diet is going to have to change in order for you to make progress.

It's that simple.

Your diet must change drastically as your goals change. You'll have to either add calories or subtract them to reach the goals that you want.

A diet for weight loss is going to be much different than a diet for weight gain. You're going to have to eat a lot less to lose weight than you are when trying to gain weight.

Well, how will you know how many calories are causing you to lose weight?

If you don't keep a diet log book, you will never know. You will have to take a guess as you go. That's no good because you'll spend most of your time going absolutely no where.

Why take the chance and guess at what you need to eat?

Keep a strict log of what you've been eating and you will get to know your body better. You will know how many calories are causing weight gain or weight loss at that time. You can use this to increase or decrease the number of calories you are eating and cause further weight loss or weight gain.

See, everything is simple if you keep a diet log book.

What Do You Need To Keep Track Of?

You can make your diet log book as detailed as you want. I like to keep the type of food and the amount if I know the amount.

For example, if I eat 1 banana I enter 1 banana. If I eat dinner consisting of lasagna, I have no idea how much hamburger meat or cottage cheese I ate.

So I simply take a guess at how much I ate and enter that in my log book. You'll get better at estimating if you break down what was in the lasagna. If it's pre-made lasagna or you are making the lasagna, it's much easier to get the amounts.

You also need to keep track of calories.

This is one of the most important entries in your log. You've got to know this.

I would also keep track of protein grams, carbohydrate grams, and fat grams. This way you can make sure you are meeting your target ranges for each of those macronutrients.

If you know how to eat for muscle building and fat loss, you might not even keep track of the amount of protein, carbs, and fats. But only experienced weight lifters should take that chance.

You can also enter the time that you ate each meal just in case you need that information. Some people will want to stop eating carbs by a certain time in the day depending on their goals. You might want to make sure you are meeting that cutoff time by recording meal times in your log book.

Summary of Diet Log Book

So, you need to keep track of 6 things in your diet log book at a minimum.

You need to record time of meal, foods eaten, calories, protein, carbs, and fat grams. Simple and easy to do. You will need this at the end of every week so you can re-assess your diet and make changes.

Experienced weight lifters may choose to not keep track of some of those things.