Starting a food and activity diary

This course is all about exploring the risk factors and prevention of cardiovascular disease. To understand this better we suggest you keep a diary that collects information on your daily diet and physical activity.

The aim of this is to investigate the lifestyle risk factors for cardiovascular disease. By starting the diary and continuing throughout the course, you will have a selection of data to use to assess your own risk of cardiovascular disease. How you use this information is up to you, but we hope that this will help you to better understand how what you learn throughout the course could affect your own health.

Although we have yet to cover the theory of this topic, you might be aware that your diet and activity levels have a big impact on your health. Risk factors can be broadly divided into things we can change and things we can’t.

This activity focuses on the some of the risk factors that we can change, such as our lifestyle.

Use this food & activity diary template to monitor your diet and activity levels until Week 4. If you cannot monitor for the 4 weeks, we recommend monitoring for 1 week at a minimum. You can print it off and fill it in by hand, or download the file to fill it in electronically (be sure to download it before filling in your data otherwise you’ll lose it when you navigate away from the web page). The PDF and word files can be found in the ‘Downloads’ section at the bottom of this step.

Think about the following points and share your thoughts with other learners:

• Have you ever had to keep a food and/or activity diary before? What was the purpose? Did you find it helpful?
• Can you predict any particular patterns that could be seen as the result of collecting data on what you eat and how much you exercise? How does this relate to your health?
• Can you think of any pros or cons for keeping a food/activity diary?

Note: It isn’t essential for you to share information if you feel it is too personal, in which case you may want to share a more general response.

Remember you can ‘Like’ and comment on responses made by other learners.

The food section of the diary is adapted from the European Prospective Investigation of Cancer (EPIC)-Norfolk 7 day diet diary and the activity section from the Core Questions on Physical Activity in EPIC Baseline Questionnaires. We would like to acknowledge the contribution of the staff and participants of the EPIC-Norfolk Study and also the Epidemiology Unit, Medical Research Council, Cambridge, UK. EPIC-Norfolk is supported by the Medical Research Council programme grants (G0401527, G1000143) and Cancer Research UK programme grant (C864/A8257).