Episode #156: How to Food Journal Without Obsessing

Food journaling can be an incredibly powerful tool for weight management—but only when it’s used the right way. For many people, tracking food brings up perfectionism, guilt, or an all-or-nothing mindset that actually works against long-term success.

In this episode, Dr. Sarah Stombaugh breaks down how to use food journals as a tool for awareness, curiosity, and understanding your body—not control or self-punishment. You’ll learn how to get the benefits of food journaling without turning it into an obsession, especially if you’ve struggled with tracking in the past or are using GLP-1 medications.

In This Episode, We Cover:

• Why food journaling works for weight loss—and why it often backfires
• Common mistakes that turn food journals into a source of stress
• How to shift from judgment to curiosity when tracking food
• How to use food journals to identify patterns—not micromanage meals
• How food journaling can support appetite awareness on GLP-1 medications
• Practical tips to keep journaling simple, sustainable, and mentally healthy

Who This Episode Is For:

• Anyone who has tried tracking food and felt overwhelmed or obsessive
• People pursuing weight loss who want a healthier relationship with food
• Those using GLP-1 medications like Wegovy or Zepbound
• Anyone who wants to understand hunger, fullness, and cravings more clearly
  
  

Ready to get started on your weight loss journey? We’re now enrolling patients for in-person visits in Charlottesville, Virginia and for telemedicine throughout the states of Illinois, Tennessee, and Virginia. Learn more and get started today at https://www.sarahstombaughmd.com

Are you taking a GLP medication? We are thrilled to share we are offering an online course, The GLP Guide, to answer the most common questions people have while taking GLP medications.

To sign up, please visit: www.sarahstombaughmd.com/glp

Transcript

Dr. Sarah Stombaugh:

This is Dr. Sarah Stombaugh, and you are listening to the Conquer Your Weight Podcast.

Announcer:

Welcome to the Conquer Your Weight Podcast, where you will learn to understand your mind and body so you can achieve long-term weight loss. Here's your host, obesity medicine physician, and life coach, Dr. Sarah Stombaugh.

Dr. Sarah Stombaugh:

If you have been reluctant about doing a food journal, then this week's talk is set exactly for you because we are going to be talking about food journals, why they can be so helpful, and how to avoid tipping into an obsession or really dangerous place with food journals, because it's easy for food journals to become a thing where we're obsessing over, creating a lot of guilt and shame. And I want to teach you how you can use a food journal to really support yourself during your weight loss journey. Now, a food journal, I think, is one of the most important tools because it allows us to take a look at what is actually happening. If you were trying to get your finances in order, you would take a look at your bank account, you would create a budget. If you were trying to start a business, you would have a business plan and you would see what's happening now and what do I need to do differently. A food journal is no different. It is a tool that can allow us to look at what is happening right now and then how do I start to move things in the direction of my goals. Now, one of the things, if you've been following me for any amount of time, you will know is that I preach food journaling in a very simple way. 

So if you are not already food journaling, I am going to recommend that you start at a very simple place, which is just a physical notebook or the Notes app of your cell phone. There are a million different apps and tools out there. And if you are using one of those or you are excited about that, by all means go for it. You are the boss of your body and I want you to do what works best for you. But if you are not doing it already, hear me out. I think that keeping it simple, starting at a very simple place can be an amazing way so that it doesn't feel like a burden. There are some apps out there where you are weighing food and measuring food or you're estimating weights or measurements, which can be really challenging to do. And it can take huge amounts of time to do that. You know, I have seen people measure and weigh their food and takes three, four, five, six, seven minutes to do that multiple times per day. And you do not want to be spending 30 minutes per day logging all of the food that you are doing, that becomes really unsustainable and really frustrating. So if you're not already doing it, let's just start really simple and you can change your mind from there if you want to. So again, diving into the notes app on your cell phone or a traditional notebook, I want you to take note of the time of day and what you ate with just enough detail that you can recall it. So this can look like 8 a.m. black coffee, two slices of toast, glass of orange juice, two eggs. That's it. You don't have to put the exact amount of orange juice that you had. You don't have to put the size of the eggs or if you made them with cheese or milk, however, you made them, it's probably the traditional way that you make your eggs and you'll be able to recall what that looked like. Now, that level of detail is really important because you can spit it out really quickly and it usually gives you the information that you're wanting to look from it. 

Some of the other tools that I have my patients layer on are things like the hunger and satiety scale. I use a 20-point scale where we can pay attention to what is hunger, what is fullness, and from there turn it into a quantitative scale to get an idea of okay, what is my body feeling? Ideally, we're going to track this at the beginning of a meal, we're going to track this at the end of a meal. And it could be a really great tool also if you're in between meals. Let's say someone offers you a snack, you can take a moment and just check in, okay, what is it that my body's feeling right now? Now you can still choose to have the snack, even if you recognize, oh, I'm not necessarily hungry, but it's a great way to just check in and know am I eating for physical hunger versus am I eating for emotional hunger and enjoyment? And that's okay. You just want to be really mindful of what you're doing. So we're doing this really simple way. We're logging what is the food, what is the time of day, starting to pay attention to things like hunger and satiety. Now, what I will also encourage my patients to do is to be mindful of other things that are going on as well. This can be different emotional triggers. So if you've had a really stressful day, something negative happened at work or in your personal life, this is a really good opportunity to jot that down. You might jot down just a single word of an emotion that you were experiencing, like boredom, frustration, anger, whatever it is that was coming up, write that in, writing that down, writing a couple of more notes about it can be really helpful. 

You might also record physical symptoms. So if you're noticing that certain foods give you headaches or nausea or bloating, paying attention to this sort of thing can be amazing. And what's so cool is that a food journal can become this tool where you start to see lots of different patterns evolve. And so we can pay attention to, okay, what does my body feel like right now? Physically, what does my body feel like from an energy level? When am I getting hungry? When am I getting food full? Are there certain foods that if I eat them, I notice I feel full for just hours afterwards? Like I feel really satiated. My body has a really good energy level versus are there other foods that I notice, oh my gosh, like an hour later, I'm completely ravenous. One thing that patients will often tell me is that when they start their day, and this doesn't have to be early in the morning, but their first meal of the day, when it's a really balanced meal that includes protein, that includes fiber, they will notice that that meal sticks with them for a longer period of time and really sets them up for success over the course of the day. So they feel like they're able to eat on two to four occasions. When they do eat, it's because they're appropriately hungry, they're not having any overhunger come up, and they feel really well satiated from the meals that they're eating. One of the things people will also notice is when they start their day with a really simple carbohydrate, for example. So it's like, okay, I have a blueberry muffin, they notice that an hour later they're ravenous and they feel their blood sugar has gone up, they feel it crash back down, and that crashing feeling feels really miserable. It feels like super hungry, maybe hangry, punch you in the face, like nausea, dizzy, just like, oh, it feels really bad to have your blood sugar crashing in that way. And what's really interesting is that it's very common people are truly having hypoglycemia or low blood sugar. 

Now, unless you're taking insulin, you know, as long as you don't have, as long as you have a functioning pancreas and you're not taking medications like insulin, you're not going to have dangerous hypoglycemia. You're not going to die from your hypoglycemia, but it can still feel really bad. You can have this blood sugar spike, and then you have your blood sugar come back down and feel really like, oh, and feel that low blood sugar feeling. And so being mindful of, okay, what are the types of foods that make me feel that way? What are the types of foods that when I eat them, I feel really miserable, maybe right away or an hour later, I just feel like, ugh, I feel my blood sugar crashing. It can be this tool that starts to allow us to see, okay, this is how different food feels inside my body. You can start to find other patterns as well. So you can start to see things like, wow, maybe there are certain days of the week that are really big challenge for me. You might notice that maybe there's a day of the week where you go into the office versus working from home or vice versa, where it becomes a lot more challenging to pack a lunch or to have foods readily available. And so you might notice, okay, on Tuesdays and Thursdays when I'm going into the office, those are the days that I want to be especially prepared. I want to have meals prepped. I want to have those ready. I want to have maybe some office snacks that are just stashed away in my drawer. So I'm not going to be tempted by the break room when I'm hungry and haven't prepared food in front of me. So you can start to see certain patterns like that emerge as well. 

You might start to see certain patterns of emotions that can be really triggering. And so seeing that, okay, maybe there's a certain time of day where emotions come up, especially boredom, an emotion that can come up in certain times of the day commonly, or maybe there's certain situations that are triggering emotional responses for you. Seeing those type of patterns may show you where it's important work to work through with a therapist or a coach, for example, to work on how do I change not just that response to it, but what's actually happening that's driving me to feel these types of emotions in the first place. So it becomes this really powerful tool where we start to draw patterns. And as you notice the way I'm talking about it, food logs, I want you to think of in a totally neutral way. It is not good, it is not bad. It is simply information. It is information that we get to start to see patterns. We get to start to see how we can shift in the direction of our goals. And I want you to think of it in that way. It is not perfectionism. I think so often, both in terms of the logging, we want to be logging either like we're doing it every single day, every single meal, or like we've, you know, sort of fallen off the train or fallen off the wagon, I guess it is, and we're not doing it anymore. So there's this perfectionism in am I actually logging? There can also be perfectionism coming up in what I'm writing down, the types of foods that I'm eating. Sometimes we may feel guilt or we may feel shame about certain food choices that we're making. And so it can lead us to not wanting to write it down and feeling this big cognitive dissonance because what we're doing is not in line with our goals for ourselves. 

So, one thing I will often encourage my patients to think about is progress over perfection. So let's take stock of what I'm doing. If you're at the very beginning of your weight loss journey, just writing down what's happening right now can be really powerful. And then we just start to take steps in the direction of your goals. The goal is not that every day looks perfect. The goal is that every day is reflecting what actually happened and that we start to just nudge things in the direction of your goals. If we think about every day getting 1% better and major air quotes here, because I don't mean morally better, you're not a better person if you're eating foods that would be traditionally considered healthy. But if every day is 1% more in line with your goals, more in step with what you are trying to achieve, we get to see that shift slowly happening over time. And it becomes this buildup where those routines just become really familiar. You don't find yourself in this like all or nothing of like I'm either eating perfectly and I'm writing it down or I'm not. And so therefore I'm skipping it. That is really, really damaging. And it's hard. Like it's hard to do this on our own. And so doing this in, you know, with the support of an obesity medicine physician, with the support of a coach or a therapist is such a powerful tool. And so I want you to be thinking about do I need support on this? Because it can be really hard. Like we are our own worst critics. We want to be successful. We a lot of times have a history of multiple diet attempts in the past that have gone some variation of well or not well, but here we are, we're starting over, and it's really hard to work on our mindset sometimes on our own. So having support in this journey is really, really important. 

And so if you're feeling like, okay, I need that support, reach, reach out and get that, whether it's from me, if I'm your physician, whether it is from another physician, another coach, whether it's from a friend or confidant, being able to reflect back. Sometimes I also find that just taking a moment and looking back at things, even if it is on your own, writing it down, saying things out loud, having a conversation with yourself, and try to imagine like removing yourself from it a little bit. Like if this was somebody else's food journal, what would I say? What would I reflect on? If I was watching a movie and this was playing out in front of me, this was someone's life, what would I think about what is happening? And try to remove yourself a little bit from a situation. And you might start to see some patterns that are emerging of like, oh, isn't it interesting that these type of foods I'm more likely to eat on these type of days? Or I'm certainly I'm likely to respond to this type of emotion with eating or with eating certain types of foods. Are there certain triggers that are coming up in my life? How do I plan according from those? Because the really amazing thing is that every failure, and again, really significant air quotes here, but any sort of setback that you're having is a huge opportunity for learning. And we can either judge ourselves in that situation, we can forgive ourselves and move along too quickly, or we can find ourselves in this really nice intermediate place where we take a moment, we reflect, and we see, okay, what went well during that situation? 

Maybe you were on vacation, maybe you were out to dinner with somebody, you know, any sort of environment. What went well and what would I have done differently? Like let's say I have a redo of this exact same situation. The same people are involved, the same foods are involved. How would I show up in that situation? And this is where we start to see really powerful changes happening. We can say, okay, I was out to dinner and I, you know, it was at someone's house for dinner. You know, this neighbor was hosting a dinner for me and for other people. And the food that they ate or the food that they were cooking was not super healthy. Okay, how could you have done that differently? Let's say they're still cooking the exact same food. What could you have done in advance? Maybe you could have reached out to the host and said, hey, what's on the menu? I'd love to bring a side dish. And so you could have brought a side dish that was in line with your goals. You could have said, okay, now that I know what's on the menu, I'm going to plan the rest of my day accordingly. If the meal is going to be really calorically dense, maybe really fatty, and you're like, okay, I know that's gonna sit kind of heavy. It's gonna be a lot of my food needs for the day are gonna come up in that meal. Let me make sure that earlier in the day I'm really leaning into some good fiber sources, choosing maybe some more low-calorie calorie options so that I go into the meal and you know, I'm feeling like, hey, I've got, you know, sort of room in my budget for this accordingly. 

Maybe it means that you eat a little bit beforehand, especially if it's more of a cocktail hour or people kind of walking around. You may not be having, if you're not having like a sit-down dinner, maybe you're going to just eat even a full meal beforehand or certainly just having like a quick protein shake or a quick salad or something at home so that when you arrive, you're not feeling ravenous and going into an environment where the foods are not in line with your goals. How could you decide to build your plate accordingly? So maybe there's a heavy dish that's being served, but there's some vegetables. And how do you make sure that you're getting plenty of vegetables, maybe eating those first in the meal, then followed by the heavier or richer foods? Trying to decide, like from a dessert perspective, trying not to have any dessert ever is often not going to be in line with your lifetime goals. You may know that sugar and like fatty or rich desserts are not something that you could do every single day, but trying to decide how do I have a relationship with these things? How do I go out to a meal and decide that I'm going to try a bite of it or even I'm going to eat the whole thing, but I'm going to be really mindful of satiety. So you get to choose what that looks like. That can be a goal of specifically what you're having, but you might also set really broad goals of okay, I have no idea what's going to be served, but I'm going to make a commitment to myself to eat at a pace that is slow. So you're not eating rapidly. I'm going to make sure to stay well hydrated. So I'm drinking water or drinking another beverage, but I'm going to say water is probably the best one. I'm drinking water in between sips. I'm making sure to eat slowly. And then I'm going to eat until I feel appropriate satiety. So really paying attention. 

Even if the food is not in line with my goals, I'm really going to pay attention to where is my body feeling that appropriate fullness and I'm going to end the meal at that point. There can be a lot of amazing things that come from this. And when we look at long-term weight loss success, this is where people really do phenomenally, is when they start to take stock of what is actually happening. And then how do I start to shift this in the direction of my goals? How do I use this as information, as a learning tool, as an opportunity to start making those goals in line with what I want for the long term? And when we can start seeing food logging in that way, it becomes the most amazing tool. Now, if you are watching this on YouTube, I'm so excited to have you here on this YouTube channel. I would love if you like and subscribe because I am getting the word out there with more and more people of how we can work to support our weight loss goals alongside realistic behavioral support. 

A lot of times we're thinking about really restrictive diets. We're thinking about, oh my gosh, I just want to like lose as much weight as quickly as possible. But my goal for you is that you establish a relationship with food that feels really good, that you feel like you're in touch with your body, you're in touch with your hunger and fullness, that maybe with the support of medications so that you're able to make choices now and also for the future that help you to feel good, to feel nourished and feel in touch with your body. Thank you so much for joining us for this week's episode. If you are looking for support in person, I would love to see you in my practice in Charlottesville, Virginia. I also see patients by telemedicine in the states of Illinois, Tennessee, and Virginia. And for people who are outside of those states, I do have an online resource called the GLP Guide. This is our online video program designed for people taking GLP medications. We're going to address all of your most frequently asked questions, as well as things like what are the behavioral tips and tools that you can use in order to find long-term weight loss success alongside these medications. You can find more information at www.sarastombaughmd.com under the online tools and online courses section. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you all next week.