How to Create a Food Diary in Notion (With Calorie Tracker)

“Keep a food diary, and you’ll know how much sh*t you’re eating”, says your fitness trainer.

While it’s good advice, doctors and fitness gurus rarely (if ever) show you how to build a sustainable habit to keep track of your food. Not even mention how to make it all fun.

You can go with the traditional paper approach or download yet another app to your already stuffed home screen.

But there’s a better way to track your calories: it’s Notion.

When it comes to project management, Notion is often the go-to tool. Its capabilities, however, stretch way beyond your workplace or your business.

Read on to find out how to create your food diary in Notion and learn how to track your calories while having fun with it.

Why Would You Want to Keep a Food Diary?

A food log is helpful for at least three reasons:

1. It helps you understand your eating habits: When you start to keep track of what you eat (and even what you drink if you’re sipping a lot of soda), you will be more aware of how much you eat.

2. It helps you track your calories: Counting your calories can be intimidating and boring, but at the end of the day, this is what shows you exactly how you’re doing. It may help you choose your food more wisely.

3. It helps you create a mindset shift: Sometimes, the biggest obstacle people have is their minds. To create lasting habits, you need to create a mindset shift. And keeping a food log can help you with this one, too.

You may not want to track your food forever. Maybe all you need is to keep track of what you eat for a couple of months until you change your eating habits.

Whatever the reason, Notion is a great way to get you started on your fitness journey.

Why Use Notion to Create a Food Diary?

Notion has been among the pioneers of the all-in-one tools, and not without a reason.

Here’s why Notion is a superior choice for creating a food diary:

• Flexibility: Notion is a non-coding, fluid environment. In Notion, everything is a block, and you can put together these blocks as you want.

• You own your data: Over time, you’ll have a large dataset to analyze. You can export your data into a single spreadsheet anytime.

• Visualization: if you’re a visual type of person, you’ll enjoy keeping a food log in Notion.

• Surfacing information: There’re a ton of ways to easily find and surface information in Notion. You can use all kinds of sorters, filters, rollups, and relations in Notion databases to surface what you need, when you need it, even from different databases.

Let’s see your food diary in action.

My Notion Food Diary

No surprises here; my Notion food diary leverages relational databases, rollups, and linked databases.

There’re three core databases in my food diary:

1. Nutrition database

2. Daily tracking database

3. Weekly review database

Let’s figure out how they work together.

Nutrition Database

I use this database to gather information about the foods I eat.

Here’re the properties of my database:

• Food: This is the not-so-fancy name for what you eat.

• kcal: This is a number property showing how many calories the food contains.

• Satiety index: This is a number property indicating how satiating the food is—the higher the number, the more filled-up you feel when you eat that type of food.

• Fat: This property simply shows the fat content of the food item.

• Protein: The protein content of the food.

• Carb: The carb content of the food.

This is a lot of data, but you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You can upload data from an established nutrition database or ask for reference numbers from your dietitian.

Alternatively, you can only use the kcal property to keep track of your calorie intake as a composite indicator. (That’s exactly what I do.)

Daily Tracking Database (Food Log)

This is where the rubber meets the road. Your daily tracking database is the place where you track your calories.

My daily tracking may differ from yours. I keep track of all my habits that are not yet established. Once I happen to establish a habit, I no longer want to keep track of that.

Taking the stairs every day, walking 40 minutes, or writing for two hours is no longer on my list because they’re rock-solid routines now. They’re my identities. I’m no longer a man who walks 40 minutes a day; I’m a walker.

You may want to track your food until you find peace and meet your target.

Let’s discuss the properties of the daily tracking database:

• Date: This is a date property showing the actual date.

• Food log: This is a relation property that connects your nutrition database with your actual food log.

• Target: This is a number property indicating the maximum number of calories you should eat a day (if you have that number).

• Progress: This is a formula property measuring how much you can eat until you reach your target calorie value. (Can be both motivating and stressful; display it if you want to.) You can find 17 different progress bar designs along with the formulas on Red Gregory’s website.

• kcal: This is a rollup property, which pulls and sums up calories from your nutrition database.

• Calories (Sum): This is a formula property, which pulls up the value from the kcal property. As you can’t make a rollup from a rollup in Notion, you can technically make this happen only by creating a simple property from your rollup (kcal) that can be later summed up in your weekly review.

• Weekly review: This relation property makes it possible to pull my numbers into my weekly review.

Weekly Review Database

The weekly review is the perfect time to see how well you’re doing, what’s working, and how you can prepare for the next week.

Selected properties of my weekly review database:

• Week: This property simply shows the calendar week of the year.

• Date: This date property displays the period with an end date. (Helpful if you want to display your week on a calendar or a timeline.)

• Days: This relation property connects my weekly review database with my actual food log (daily tracking).

• Calories (avg): This rollup property pulls up my calories from the food log and shows the average daily calorie intake for the week.

How to Feature Your Food Diary in a Notion Dashboard

Notion folks are very creative with their dashboards. At a minimum, you can create a dedicated page where you feature your most important metrics, projects, and habits.

To feature your food diary in a Notion dashboard, follow these steps:

Step 1. Navigate to your daily tracking database (food log), and copy the page link (Ctrl + L).

Step 2. Paste this link (Ctrl + V) into your dashboard page, and select Create linked view of database.

Step 3. Create a filter showing the current date and yesterday only. (I prefer to showcase

yesterday, too because sometimes I forget to add evening meals to my food log.)

This way, you’ll have a focused view that helps you track what you eat without navigating to the parent database.

You can play around with what you want to display and the order you want properties to appear on your screen. Find a setting that’s aesthetic and easy to use.

Pro tip: Get Notion to open your dashboard whenever you launch the application.

Move your dashboard page to the top page in the sidebar, then open Settings > My Notifications & Settings, find Open on start, and select Top page in the sidebar.

A Word on Portion Size

The only drawback of my Notion food diary is that you can only select discrete, individual items from the nutrition database.

This means that you should create individual entries for each food in your nutrition database for different-sized servings or packaging.

For example, if you eat the same food twice a day, you can’t pick up the same entry from your nutrition database twice. That means your calorie measures will be flawed.

You should therefore create a “two-serving” version of your favorite foods or snacks for proper measuring.

Final Words

Don’t be hard on yourself. In his book, behavioral scientist Katy Milkman argues that having a flexible routine helps keep you on track. Allow yourself one or two days of eating what you want and skip tracking your calories.

Also, you can keep track of your mood or energy levels in your daily tracking database which may help you establish a relationship with what you eat.

And remember, keep things simple and fun; you can always tweak your Notion system downstream.

Cover photo by Cristiano Pinto on Unsplash