At this point, you may think that your journal is getting rather full. After all, you are including the meal, your portion, the nutritional information about what you ate, where you ate, who you ate with, and how often you went between eating anything. But there is still more to add.

This time we are talking about rating your hunger on a hunger scale. Unlike so many of the other food journal entries before, the way you rate your hunger is completely up to you and you alone. Only you know how hungry you are before meals.

Before you enter any hunger scale information in to your ongoing food journal, you first have to create the scale. You should just use a simple scale from one to five or from one to ten. One being the least hungry and five or ten (depending on how you structure your scale) being a point where your stomach has been grumbling for hours and you're feeling lightheaded.

In order to properly keep track of your hunger scale, you have to enter your hunger information into your journal before each meal–not after.

When it comes time to analyze your hunger scale information, you should look at it with reference to the time between meals. Use your hunger scale to determine if you are eating out of habit (by the clock), because of necessity (you have to eat now or you won't get a chance later), or just because you get hungry.

While you certainly do not want to find that you are scoring one after one after one on your hunger scale, you do not want to let yourself score consistently high either. Eating too much when you're scoring low means that you are eating too often while eating too much while you are scoring high means that you are prone to overeating.

You should aim for a three on a scale of one to five or a five on a scale of one to ten.