Food Diary Template: A Layout to Copy, Print and Fill In

A food diary template needs five columns: time, food, amount, how it was cooked and a note. Copy the layout below into a document or spreadsheet and fill it in as you eat. The time cost is real but it shrinks. In a 24-week online weight-control program, 142 adults logged their food. They averaged 23.2 minutes a day on it in month 1 and 14.6 in month 6.

What goes into a food diary template?

Five columns do the job. Time shows when you eat and food names what it was. Amount carries the numbers. “How cooked” catches the oil and butter that never get their own line. Note is yours: where you were, how hungry you were, whether something sat badly.

Here is the layout. Copy it as it is, add rows when a day runs long, and fill in one sheet per day.

Day: ______ Date: ______

Time	Food or drink	Amount (g or ml)	How cooked	Note

To print it, paste the table into Google Docs or Word. In Chrome, Google Docs can also save the printout as a PDF if you want a file to keep. Nothing needs downloading, and the layout works on paper too. Other layouts are collected under food diary templates.

Leave the calories column out of the first week. It is the column that slows you down, and you can add it afterward from the amounts. The amount column is the one you can’t rebuild later. When you do add calories, the food tracker template has rows for protein, carbs, fat, totals and a target.

How do I fill in a food diary so it’s useful?

Write each entry when you eat, in grams, with the state of the food. The rest of this page explains why each part is there.

Timing comes first. A review of studies that compared reported intake with energy measured by doubly labeled water found a widespread bias toward underestimating intake. The review didn’t test when people wrote things down. My reason for writing at the table is simpler. An evening recap loses the handful of nuts, the second coffee with milk, the bite of someone else’s dessert.

Grams come second, because cups and spoons hide large gaps. Take rice. USDA lists 1 cup of raw white rice at 185 g and 365 kcal per 100 g, which is 675 kcal. It lists 1 cup of cooked white rice at 158 g and 130 kcal per 100 g, which is 205 kcal. Same cup, same word “rice”, a gap of 470 kcal. Writing “rice, cooked, 158 g” settles it.

Third, be careful when you copy an amount off a label. The NHS says nutrition information is given per 100 g or 100 ml, and sometimes per portion. It warns that the manufacturer’s idea of a portion may differ from yours. If you weighed it, write what you weighed.

A line like “salad” or “sandwich” gives you nothing to add up. Weighing only the food you can be bothered to weigh doesn’t work either, because the diary ends up exact in some places and blank in others. Pick one habit instead: weigh the single food you eat most often for a week, and write the rest in measures. Given the gap above, cooked rice is a good first pick.

When there’s no scale, write the measure and the state, then convert later. These are the weights USDA lists for common measures.

Measure	Weight	Record
1 cup cooked white rice	158 g	Rice, white, long-grain, cooked
1 cup dry rolled oats	81 g	Oats, regular and quick, dry
1 cup 2% milk	244 g	Milk, reduced fat, 2%
1 cup shredded cheddar	105 g	Cheese, cheddar
2 tbsp smooth peanut butter	32 g	Peanut butter, smooth style
1 tbsp olive oil	13.5 g	Oil, olive, salad or cooking
1 large egg without shell	50.3 g	Eggs, Grade A, Large, egg whole

What does a filled-in food diary look like?

Like a list with weights. Below is one day filled in with USDA records, so you can see the level of detail. It is a sample for the format, not a target and not a day to copy. Each energy figure is the record’s kcal per 100 g times the grams, rounded to the nearest whole kcal.

Time	Food or drink	Amount	How cooked	Energy
07:30	Rolled oats, 379 kcal/100 g	40 g	dry weight	152 kcal
07:30	Milk, 2%, 50 kcal/100 g	150 g	in the oats	75 kcal
07:30	Banana, 88 kcal/100 g	115 g	peeled	101 kcal
10:30	Coffee, 2 kcal/100 g	248 g	brewed	5 kcal
10:30	Milk, 2%, 50 kcal/100 g	30 g	in the coffee	15 kcal
10:30	Almonds, 584 kcal/100 g	28 g	raw	164 kcal
13:00	Tuna, canned in water, 90 kcal/100 g	107 g	drained	96 kcal
13:00	Wheat bread, 274 kcal/100 g	58 g	2 slices	159 kcal
13:00	Cheddar, 408 kcal/100 g	30 g	sliced	122 kcal
16:00	Greek yogurt, nonfat, 61 kcal/100 g	156 g	plain	95 kcal
16:00	Orange, 47 kcal/100 g	140 g	peeled	66 kcal
19:30	Chicken breast, 166 kcal/100 g	120 g	braised	199 kcal
19:30	White rice, 130 kcal/100 g	200 g	boiled	260 kcal
19:30	Broccoli, 32 kcal/100 g	76 g	raw	24 kcal
19:30	Olive oil, 884 kcal/100 g	13.5 g	1 tbsp in the pan	119 kcal
Total				1,652 kcal

A rushed entry would have dropped the milk in the oats, the milk in the coffee and the oil in the pan. Together they come to 209 kcal, and none of them is a food you would think to list. That is the case for the “how cooked” column.

The oats show the same trap. The record is for dry oats, so 40 g is the dry weight, not the weight of the porridge. Weigh a cooked bowl at 250 g, log it against the dry-oat record, and the entry comes out more than five times too high. Write the state next to the number every time.

What do the most common diary slips cost?

Four slips cause most of the gaps in my diaries. In each row, a quick entry meets the USDA record for what was actually eaten.

Slip	Written	Eaten	Gap
Dry oats logged as cooked	1 cup of cooked oats, 234 g at 71 kcal/100 g: 166 kcal	1 cup of dry oats, 81 g at 379 kcal/100 g: 307 kcal	141 kcal missing
A slice of cheese for a cup	1 slice of cheddar, 17 g at 408 kcal/100 g: 69 kcal	1 cup shredded, 105 g: 428 kcal	359 kcal missing
A glass of milk left out	nothing	1 cup of 2% milk, 244 g at 50 kcal/100 g: 122 kcal	122 kcal missing
A spread left out	nothing	2 tbsp of smooth peanut butter, 32 g at 597 kcal/100 g: 191 kcal	191 kcal missing

The first two are unit slips, and grams in the amount column catch them. The last two are omissions. Only writing the entry at the table has ever fixed those for me.

How do I write down a dish I cooked myself?

Weigh the ingredients as they go in, weigh the finished pot, then log your bowl as a share of the pot. Take a pot of chicken and rice with 600 g of cooked rice at 130 kcal per 100 g, which is 780 kcal. Add 480 g of braised chicken breast at 166 kcal per 100 g, which is 797 kcal, and 27 g of olive oil at 884 kcal per 100 g, which is 239 kcal. The pot weighs 1,107 g and holds 1,816 kcal, or 164 kcal per 100 g. A 350 g bowl is 574 kcal.

Write the line as “chicken and rice, 350 g of a 1,107 g pot”. That keeps the arithmetic easy to redo. Rice cooked in the pot from raw is a special case: water changes the pot’s weight but not its energy. Take the energy from the raw weights and the share from the finished pot.

How long should I keep a food diary?

For most people, a week, because one week includes a weekend and shows a pattern. If a doctor or dietitian asked for a certain number of days, do that and ignore this section. Clinics often ask for a ruled week, and the 7-day food diary PDF shows how to fill one in for a GP or dietitian.

A week shows a pattern. It doesn’t show your exact usual intake. A 1987 USDA study followed 29 adults for a year and asked how many days of records it took to estimate usual food energy to within 10%. For the group’s average the answer was 3 days. For an individual it averaged 31 days. Treat a week as a close look at your habits, not a measurement of you.

The evidence for the habit itself is thinner than the advice suggests. A 2011 review of 22 studies, 15 of them on food diaries, found that self-monitoring was consistently linked with weight loss. It rated the evidence weak, citing study methods, similar samples and reliance on self-report. Linked is not caused. The safer reading is that a diary shows you what you eat, and what to do with that is your call, or your clinician’s.

How do I read a food diary at the end of the week?

Start with the biggest line, then work down. In the sample day above, dinner is 602 kcal of 1,652 kcal, which is 36%. Breakfast is 20%, lunch 23% and the two snack times together 21%. Inside dinner, the rice and the olive oil make 379 kcal, or 63% of the meal. That is where a single weighed spoonful matters most.

With a full week in front of you, ask which meal is largest on most days. Then look for the foods that turn up on all seven. Last, look for gaps, such as a long stretch with no entry or a day with no drinks listed. The repeating foods are worth weighing once and then reusing. A porridge you make the same way every morning only needs measuring the first time.

A blank is rarely a true zero. If Thursday afternoon is empty, ask what happened before you assume nothing did.

Then pick one thing to change, or none. A diary describes what you eat. It doesn’t grade it, and a week with no changes is still a finished week. When you’re done, stop, or switch to a lighter version such as logging only dinner.

How do I put a week on one page?

Copy a second, smaller table with one row a day.

Day	Total energy	Largest meal	Foods weighed	Gaps
Mon
Tue
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat
Sun

Total energy is the sum of the energy column on that day’s sheet, rounded to the nearest whole kcal. For the largest meal, write its name and its share, as in the sample day, where dinner is 602 kcal of 1,652 kcal, or 36%. Under foods weighed, count only the foods you put on a scale. Gaps is for a stretch with no entry.

For a weekly average, add the totals and divide by the number of days with entries. A week with one missing day averages over six days, because an empty day is not a day of zero.

Should I use paper, a spreadsheet or an app?

Use whichever one you will open in the moment. In my experience a diary filled in at night is the one with holes in it. Each format has a cost.

Paper has no battery and no search. Nothing adds itself up. It suits three or four days of learning your portions.

A spreadsheet adds the column for you and lets you copy a day you repeat; the calorie tracker spreadsheet guide builds one in Google Sheets. Typing on a phone is slow, though, and every food is a row you enter by hand. An app is faster per entry once you have logged a food. It also brings its own database, which means a different failure: you may pick the wrong entry without noticing.

The 23.2 and 14.6 minutes above come from an online tool inside a weight-control program. Take them as one data point for how long this takes.

If you’d rather not type every row, Calsa accepts a line like “oatmeal 250 g, banana” and repeats a day with “Copy to today”. Each number shows its source and the math behind it, so the diary keeps the amounts this template asks for.