Analyze the calories, macro and micronutrients of your clients’ food diaries

What is the importance of nutritional analysis of food diaries in between appointments? How can you follow-up on them? Read our article to discover!

Knowing how your clients are doing between appointments, face-to-face or remotely, is essential to achieving their goals.

Following up with your clients the right way requires several strategies that nutrition professionals should adopt, including food diary logging by clients, followed by its analysis and feedback by the professional.

With Nutrium, it is already possible to offer clients a mobile app that allows them to register if they are compliant with the meal plan*, if they made changes to any meal or didn't follow the recommendations from anywhere.

So the nutrition professional can get the most out of this feature. With the nutritional analysis of food diaries, the nutrition professionals can know if any deviations regarding the meal plan contribute to an energy and macro and micronutrient intake that may compromise the nutritional intervention.

Now, it is possible to analyze the number of calories, carbohydrates, protein, and fat the client consumed and the number of micronutrients that clients log in their food diaries.

How to do the nutritional analysis of food diaries

This feature is available in the appointment layout or in the client's profile, in step 2. Follow-up.

First, you should give your client access to the mobile app.

Make sure you have the option "Food Diary" enabled for all your clients in the Configurations and preferences page.

If you want to enable this feature only for some clients, you should access their profile and enable it in the Deliverables section.

As soon as your clients have access to the mobile app, they can register their food diaries. This information will be updated automatically in the software, and you will be able to see it in more detail in the Follow-up tab in each client's profile.

Here it is possible to see the monthly calendar, which will include:

• the food diary logs;
• the water intake logs;
• the physical activity logs.

This information is represented below in more detail, now including the nutritional information of the completed food diaries.

1. Comparing the food diary and the prescribed meal plan, when the foods were successfully complied with

When your clients register their food diary according to what was recommended, the meals will show in green, and the nutrition analysis will be represented in the circles, as in the image below:

2. Comparing the food diary and the prescribed meal plan, when your client ate less than what was recommended

3. Comparing the food diary and the prescribed meal plan, when your client ate more than what was recommended.

In all cases, you can always select specific meals and analyze which foods your clients are not eating or what changes they are making.

When the consumed amount exceeds what was recommended, Nutrium will inform you:

As for micronutrients, you can easily check in the bar chart if your client is reaching the meal plan recommendations or not. You can hover your mouse over each bar and see what is the quantity of each vitamin and mineral that was in fact consumed by your client, as well as the % in relation to what you planned in the meal plan.

Analyzing a food diary without prescribing a meal plan

It is also possible to analyze calories, macronutrients, and micronutrients of a food diary without having a meal plan associated with it.

This option comes in handy when you want to analyze a 3-day food diary before the consultation.

You should give your clients access to the mobile app as soon as they book an appointment with you and ask them to register that information. The process is identical to the previous one.

In this case, the analysis is made in the same section of the appointment layout - Follow-up. The only difference is that Nutrium will not have the meal plan information to make the comparison.

In the monthly view of the calendar, this food diary will show in gray.

You can also see in detail which foods the client consumed to make a complete nutritional assessment.

In the case of micronutrients, if the client does not have a meal plan prescribed, you will be able to check the quantities of vitamins and minerals the client consumed and compare this value with the recommendations from Food and Nutrition Board or SACN.

If your clients are still not using the Nutrium mobile app, give them access today and secure their nutritional follow-up between appointments remotely. You can test the mobile app by following these instructions.

This feature was a very requested one by our professionals, and in the future, we want to keep improving it to work with the best tools available in the market. Nutritional analysis of food diaries is so important, that we just couldn't stop ourselves from improving it!

If you were waiting for this feature to use Nutrium or give your clients access to the mobile app, now is the time. Sign up and start taking full advantage of our platform today.

*This feature is only avaiable for the Nutrium Follow-up package. Learn here how to get it.