Reflecting on your nutrition habits
Begin by reflecting on your nutrition habits for the two weeks before you started this course - What can you recall about the food choices you were making?
A good way to be able to reflect on your food choices and how they might be impacting your mental wellbeing is to keep a food diary.
For the first two weeks of this course, we encourage you to keep your own food diary, and at the end of each day, reflect upon how you have been feeling.
Keeping a food diary
Make a note of what foods and drinks you are consuming throughout the day, at breakfast, lunch and dinner, as well as any snacks!
You can do this in any way that suits you, so you can be creative. Some examples are writing down the foods you are eating in a journal or notebook, entering it into an app on your phone or taking photos of each meal.
At the end of every day, reflect on how the day has gone in general, and jot down a few words, or a sentence that describes how you feel.
You could rate your mood from 0 to 10 where zero represents feeling pretty awful and 10 is feeling great. What were some key emotions you felt? How were your energy levels? Did you have any highs or lows? Just write as much or as little as you feel!
Where to keep your food diary
You can consider using the following tools, or others that would work best for you:
- Google Docs
- Microsoft Word
- Evernote or other note-taking tools
- Food diary apps for android or iphone smart phones
- Paper notebook and pen
When deciding which tool to use, consider whether you want to work online or offline, how you will organize it, and whether you’d like to keep your reflections private or share with a particular audience.
Happy reflecting!