Boost Client Engagement and Accountability with Journals

January 13, 2020

While we know that keeping a food or lifestyle journal creates a sense of mindfulness for your clients, adding them into your practice is also a great way of building high-quality customer interactions, improving customer engagement, and increasing client accountability.

Journals can help your client shed light on patterns, behaviors and identify positive and negative triggers that need to be eliminated or encouraged. Journaling can even create a sense of control which allows your clients to become more informed, active participants over their own minds and bodies.

Practice Better offers two journals that will help keep your clients engaged and accountable for their daily choices. The Food & Mood Journal allows your clients to track their food intake per meal. Clients can do this by selecting foods from the nutrition database, free form entries, uploading photos, or scanning barcodes. They will also be able to reflect on how they felt before and after the meal, ensuring highly engaged customers.

The Lifestyle Journal targets areas such as their overall mood, daily bowel movements, weight, and includes a note section for your client to communicate and record things outside these categories. You can give your client access to both these journals for a more holistic and comprehensive approach.

The Food & Mood Journal and Lifestyle Journal can also become powerful tools for practitioners too. Seeing into your client’s daily life will allow you to customize your treatment methods, hone in on problem areas, and provide real-time, online, personalized feedback. You can use these journal tools and tricks, to build communication and trust, and to boost client accountability.

Create Dialogue by Commenting on Journal Entries

You can comment on each entry to establish a sense of communication with your client in your customer engagement strategy. You can use comments to encourage your clients, ask them follow-up questions, or even provide feedback on their entry.

Clients can even respond to your comments directly from their entry to reply to your questions or pose questions to seek further direction and clarity.

Learn more about commenting on journals!

Customize to Suit the Needs of your Clients

You know your clients best and we want our journals to reflect this. They can be adjusted and tailored to your client base or individual client needs, providing the best customer experience.

Some clients may not need to see their macronutrients reflected in their Food & Mood Journal and on the other hand, some clients may need daily macronutrient and water intake targets to keep them on track. You can customize journal settings per client by either disabling the nutrient details from the client’s portal or setting personalized nutrient and water intake targets.

You can also streamline the categories of the Lifestyle journal to better suit your client’s needs. For example, you can disable mood tracking, bowel movement tracking, or weight and measurement tracking if they do not pertain to your client’s health goals.

To learn more about disabling categories in the Lifestyle Journal, click here.

Keep Your Records Up-to-date by Auto-Populating Your Client’s Measurements From the Lifestyle Journal.

Ensure that your client’s record is always up-to-date with your client’s progressing measurements by importing your client’s weight log from the Lifestyle Journal into their record.

Each weight entry that your client submits will be automatically entered in the Measurement and Vitals section of your client’s record; you will have easy access to your client’s current weight without flipping through pages or multiple clicks and you won’t have to manually update their record to reflect their current weight again.

Keeping your clients engaged and accountable is a challenge that all practitioners face. While some clients can work independently, others require some hand-holding. In both cases, food logging and journaling can be invaluable tools to help your clients build the self-awareness and confidence that they need to achieve their health goals.


Practice Better is the complete practice management platform for nutritionists, dietitians, and wellness professionals. Streamline your practice and begin your 14-day free trial today.

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