Preventing Cancer with Food: Tracking your progress.

It’s easy to learn about what foods you should eat to prevent cancer, or live healthy after cancer. However, it’s MUCH harder to actually do it!! For many people that I work with, I have them keep track of what they are eating so we can set some healthy eating goals and really identify what areas of their food intake needs improvements.

This is something you can do too! Use the tracking form below keep track of what you’re eating each week. Some people write down everything they eat. Sometimes I suggest that they just keep track of certain aspects of their food intake. Especially if it seems like too much work to write down everything you eat, just focus on 1 or 2 things.

Download nutrition tracker

Here are some examples of things you can track to see how you are doing:

• Write down all foods and beverages consumed
• Focus only on the fruits and vegetables you eat
• Keep track of your fluid intake
• Focus on one meal (for example, breakfast)

Keep track for a week. At the end of the week look back over each day and make some observations on what choices you made. Keep in mind these are OBSERVATIONS, not judgments. Many people use this time to criticize what they did. Don’t! That isn’t productive. We want to observe what is going on, and focus on some things to change.

If you didn’t make the best choices, think about why (I call these barriers). Was it stress? Emotions? Convenience? Knowing why you made the choice is the first step in making a change.

Once you decide what to work on, write it down where you can be reminded of it daily. Put it on the fridge, on your bathroom mirror or in your wallet. Keep track for another week and see if you improved. Again, look at your barriers and pick one area to work on.

It takes 3 weeks of making a change before it becomes a habit.  Work on one thing for 2 or 3 weeks before you decide to focus on something else.

Happy Tracking!!
Julie