Keep a food diary
See how your food and drink compares with the NHS Eatwell Guide by logging everything for a week.
You’ve probably heard that we should aim to eat a balanced diet. But what does that mean?
The Eatwell Guide helps us to sort our food into different food groups and shows us how much of what we eat should come from each food group. You can find out more about it on the NHS website.
If you think about what you eat, is it balanced? It doesn’t have to be every time you eat something, but overall we should be aiming to eat a range of different foods - at least 5 portions of different fruit and vegetables every day and around a third of our diet made up of starchy carbohydrates, like potatoes and brown bread.
So it might help to think about what you actually do eat and work out whether you are getting a good balance of food in your diet. Try keeping a record of everything (including snacks) that you eat and drink over a week, keeping a score of the number of portions of foods from each category.
We’ve provided a template that you can print off and fill in each day, but you could easily design your own version too.
At the end of the week total up the portions of each different category and see whether you’re in line with the Eatwell Guide.