Your body IS communicating with you… Every minute of every hour of every day it is telling you whether what you have eaten is right or what you have eaten is wrong for your health, fitness or weight loss goals. I’m not just talking about the common sense stuff and that little voice inside your head saying, ‘don’t eat the doughnut it’s bad for you’.
I’m talking about the important stuff, headaches lethargy, weight gain and illness. If you know how to listen you can start formulating a better diet - one more suited to your body; one that is more suited to your genetic makeup. This is a tool that we use with our nutrition clients to help them become experts in what foods are good for them and moving them towards their goal and what foods are bad for
them. People are often surprised by which foods make them feel great, full for hours and full of energy.
This simple tool will also allow you to cut through all the rubbish that the press pushes on us calling it health and nutrition advice and enabling you to make an informed decision as to whether a food, or diet is actually good for you.
The tool that we use is called a daily check record sheet (DCR). It is a way of keeping a food diary but is more comprehensive than just writing your foods down. Here is a an example of a section of a daily check record sheet;
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REACTIONS TO YOUR METABOLIC TYPE DIET |
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FOOD INTAKE - List all foods & drinks consumed |
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| TODAY’S DATE: |
Place a check to the left of all descriptions that describe your experience 1 – 2 hours after each meal |
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| Time Breakfast |
APPETITE SATIETY CRAVINGS |
Feel full, satisfied | Feel physically full, but still hungry | ||
| Do NOT have sweet cravings | Have desire for something sweet | ||||
| Do NOT desire more food | Not satisfied, feel like something was missing | ||||
| Do NOT feel hungry | Already hungry | ||||
| Do NOT need to snack before next meal | Feel the need for a snack | ||||
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ENERGY LEVELS |
Energy feels renewed | Meal gave too much or too little energy | |||
| Have good, lasting, “normal” sense of energy | Became hyper, jittery, shaky, nervous or speedy | ||||
| Felt hyper, but exhausted “underneath” | |||||
| Energy tanked from meal – exhaustion, sleepiness, drowsiness, listlessness or lethargy | |||||
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MIND EMOTIONS WELL-BEING |
Improved well-being | Mentally slow, sluggish, or spacy | |||
| Sense of feeling refueled, renewed and restored | Inability to think quickly or clearly | ||||
| Some emotional upliftment | Hyper, overly rapid thoughts | ||||
| Improved mental clarity and sharpness | Inability to focus or concentrate | ||||
| Normalization of thought processes | Apathy, depression, withdrawal or sadness | ||||
| Anxious, obsessive, fearful, angry or irritable | |||||
How to use the DCR?
Fill in the left hand column with what you have eaten; just like a regular diet diary. Then, 1.5 hours after consuming the food, use the tick sheet to determine whether the meal was good for you or bad for you; whether it had a positive effect on your mood, concentration and energy levels or a negative effect.
Why 1.5 hours?
It does not have to be exactly 1.5 hours, you can do anywhere between 1.5 and 2 hours. This time gap between eating the meal and filling in the tick sheet allows your meal time to be digested and absorbed. It should therefore be affecting you on a cellular level. How you now feel is a direct relation to how the cells of your body are feeling and operating.
Keith Tucker
