While many dancers focus on meal planning to support their training, food journaling is another powerful tool that can help. But how do these two approaches differ, and when is one more beneficial than the other? In this blog post, we’ll break down the differences between meal planning and food journaling, explore when each is helpful, and discuss how to use food journaling in a positive, supportive way.
Meal Planning versus Food Journaling
First, let’s clarify the differences between these two tools. Meal planning involves mapping out what you’ll eat in advance, whether a day, week or even a month. It’s about setting meals and snacks on specific days to ensure you’re consuming the nutrients your body needs to perform at its best. For some, planning a week’s meals and snacks helps to make sure certain foods and ingredients are on hand— a time and money saver. Food journaling involves writing down everything you eat and drink throughout the day, along with your thoughts, feelings, and hunger cues associated with each meal or snack. It’s less about planning and more about reflecting. The goal of food journaling is to increase mindfulness around your eating habits, discover patterns in your food choices, and better understand how certain foods impact your energy, mood, and performance.
Should dancers track what they eat?
As a dietitian for dancers, I work closely with my clients to build habits that encompass a non-restrictive approach to eating. Through the process, we utilize body attunement to rebuild self-trust, learning to identify feelings of hunger, fullness, and satisfaction. It’s part of intuitive eating, a core technique of The Healthy Dancer®. It enables us to assess how various foods make us feel physically, mentally, and emotionally. It also allows us to make space for self-care. Side note: I’m not referring to the kind of self-care that involves getting a massage or booking a spa day. Those are luxuries. I’m referring to the basic necessity of life: eating.
But how do techniques like meal planning and food journaling fit into the intuitive approach without becoming obsessive?
When Is Meal Planning Helpful for Dancers?
Busy schedules and high levels of physical activity (like dancing) often prevent dancers from fueling sufficiently. In addition to this, dancers remain at an increased risk for disordered eating. Meal planning can provide external structure when interoceptive awareness (innate hunger and fullness cues) is diminished. Years (even months!) of restrictive eating can damage our innate ability to feel and listen to hunger and fullness cues. Creating a flexible daily meal plan assures that we are meeting our body’s primitive needs for nourishment while working to repair our instinctual clock.
Dancers with ADHD and Autism might also struggle with interoceptive awareness and, therefore, benefit from meal planning to ensure the body is adequately nourished. Having meals prepped and ready means you always have something nourishing on hand. Here’s an article that dives deeper into the role of meal planning for dancers.
When Is Food Journaling Helpful for Dancers?
Food journaling can serve as a helpful tool for dancers looking to heal their relationships with food. Utilizing a temporary food journal supports intuitive exploration— identifying hunger and fullness cues, unraveling restrictive food thoughts, and raising awareness of when food becomes a coping tool for distress (something I chat about here). A few key instances when food journaling becomes helpful are:
- Mindful Eating: If you often find yourself eating on autopilot or without being fully aware of your choices, food journaling can help you become more conscious of your eating habits. By noting how you feel before and after meals, you may begin to notice patterns in how different foods impact your energy, focus, and mood.
- Identifying Patterns and Triggers: If you’re struggling with symptoms like stomach discomfort, journaling what you eat and how you feel can help you identify behaviors that might worsen the issue. A common example is when dancers aren’t eating enough.
- Emotional Connection to Food: A food journal can provide insights into how emotions like stress, anxiety, or celebration influence food choices.
When Is Food Journaling Problematic for Dancers?
Even a supportive food journal can turn into something obsessive. Tracking what and how much you eat is a behavior rooted in diet culture. For most, the need to track food intake often ties into goals of portion control— calorie targets and maximum allowances. Food journaling (and even meal planning) can easily provoke anxiety if perfectionistic tendencies turn a flexible plan into rigid rules. While food journaling can be an excellent tool for self-awareness, there are potential downsides if it’s not approached with a healthy mindset:
- Tracking Fixation: If you become too fixated on tracking every detail of your food intake, it may lead to obsessive thoughts or anxiety around food. If journaling begins to feel stressful or consuming, it’s time to take a step back.
- Perfectionism: There’s a risk of using food journaling to “monitor” every bite and seek perfection in your diet. This can lead to a restrictive mindset, where you may feel guilty if you eat something “off plan” or stray from your goals.
- Negative Emotional Patterns: Using journaling to judge or shame yourself for certain food choices can reinforce negative thought patterns.
How To Food Journal, Positively:
Early in the process of healing your relationship with food, food journaling can function to help reconnect your innate feelings of hunger, fullness, and satisfaction. You re-learn the types and amounts of food that help you feel satiated and energized.
A supportive food journal is not meant to track calories or macros. The goal is to increase awareness and understanding, not to criticize yourself for what you eat. The Healthy Dancer® offers food journaling as a tool for exploration to help harness body attunement and rebuild self-trust. You can also utilize food journaling to notice how foods make you feel and whether or not certain foods cause digestive discomfort. Eliminating any food or food group can be detrimental to a dancer who is either on the road to recovery from an eating disorder or on the journey towards healing their relationship with food.
Key Takeaways:
A food journal can be a tool for reflection, but approach it with curiosity, not judgment. If attempting to micromanage your food choices, you’ll need to reassess, and working alongside a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist is encouraged. A few considerations to get started:
- Record not just what you eat, but also how you feel during and after meals. Were you hungry? Stressed? Energized?
- Use it to uncover patterns, such as how specific foods make you feel or how your emotions affect your eating habits.
- Take breaks when needed—journaling isn’t a constant requirement, and it’s okay to step away if it becomes overwhelming.
- Reflect on your journal entries at the end of each week to identify trends and make adjustments.
