Nutrition Chart
Gather rich insights on your client's daily nutrition intake using our Nutrition Chart, designed for Registered Dietitians and Registered Dietitian Nutritionists to help their clients achieve their personalized nutrition goals.
Fact Checked by Nate Lacson.
What is a Nutrition Chart?
As a Registered Dietitian (RD) or Registered Dietitian Nutritionist (RDN) part of understanding your client’s needs will be understanding their current nutrition intake and dietary habits. There are many ways you can do this, such as conducting a 24-hour recall exercise or having your client keep a food diary, but both of these methods focus on meals rather than nutrition in the form of fats, protein, and carbohydrates.
That’s where our Nutrition Chart comes in! This handy chart allows your clients to record their meals and snacks, and includes space for tallying up macronutrients such as fat, protein and carbohydrates, including sugars and fiber, as well as micronutrients such as sodium, and the total calories.
This chart can be used to track a day’s worth of eating, and once completed, it can help you monitor how your client’s daily intake is meeting their nutrition goals.
Printable Nutrition Charts
Download these Nutrition Charts to improve your client's nutritional outcomes and experience.
How To Use This Nutrition Chart
Using this nutrition chart correctly will take a little time, but getting quantitative data on how your client’s day is matching up to their nutrition or eating plan will make all the tallying worth it! Just follow this step-by-step guide to start getting the clearest possible picture of your client’s day-to-day nutritional intake.
Step One. Download the Chart
The first step to implementing this chart in your nutrition practice is to download the nutrition chart template, which you can do from the link on this page. The chart is an interactive PDF which your client can fill in digitally, so there’s no need to print it out.
Step Two. Decide Which Parts your Client will Complete
Before you give your client the chart, ensure they understand how to read nutrition labels, and which columns they need to fill in throughout the day. Alternatively, you can have your client fill in the Food column only, and you can come back once they have completed this column and estimate the macronutrients for each food item yourself. For a client working towards a specific nutrition goal, e.g. 100g of protein a day, they may not necessarily need to fill out all the other nutrition columns, e.g. Sodium, Fats, Sugar, and they should feel free to leave any columns that are not relevant to them blank.
Step Three. Give the Chart to your Client with their Goals
The next step is to provide the chart to your client, along with the nutrition goals that you have developed as their dietitian or nutritionist. This may be as simple as a daily calorie goal to aim for, or could go more in-depth into their macronutrient intake with protein, fat, or carbohydrate goals.
Step Four. Review the Nutrition Chart
Once your client has completed the chart, they should return it to you to review and go through with them. This is the time for learning about your client and figuring out strategies to aid them in meeting their nutrition goals. This chart can be a handy ice-breaker or tool to gain an initial understanding of your client's eating habits.
Step Five. Store the Chart Securely
The last step is to store the nutrition chart securely in your client’s record, as it contains confidential health information on your client.
Nutrition Chart Example (Sample)
To get an understanding of the sorts of information that can be gathered using this nutrition chart, just take a look at our example below. This example captures a single day of eating for a client with daily protein and fiber intake goals.
Download this Nutrition Chart Example (Sample) here:
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Who Can Use this Printable Nutrition Chart (PDF)?
This nutrition chart was designed with clients of Registered Dietitians and Registered Dietitian Nutritionists in mind, for the reason that setting personalized nutrition goals and nutrition plans requires specialist knowledge of dietetics and nutrition science.
This chart is particularly useful for clients who want a better understanding of their daily nutrition intake, who want to learn to read nutrition labels, or who simply want to understand what is in the food they eat on a daily basis.
Additionally, clients who need to strictly monitor aspects of their nutrition intake for health reasons, such as diabetes, can also benefit from using this template as they will learn how to track various macronutrients throughout the day.
Why Is This Form Useful For Nutritionists?
Get a better understanding of your client’s nutrition habits
With a day’s worth of quantitative macronutrient data, you’ll be able to get much richer insight into your client’s dietary habits than a simple food recall task. You can determine the best nutritional goals and strategies for your client based on their nutrition chart results, as well as use them to get an idea of your client’s current eating habits.
Built-in calculations
We’ve included handy calculation cells to tally up the entries for each of the nutrition columns to save you time summing up all the various cells. To utilize this feature, ensure the PDF is kept in a digital form and completed in compatible PDF reader software such as Adobe Acrobat.
Repeat over time
Repeating this nutrition chart exercise over time can help to elucidate changes in your client’s eating habits and nutritional intake since they started seeing you. This can be a great way to measure progress towards goals, or just changes in their eating style, which may otherwise have gone unnoticed.
Why Use Carepatron For Nutrition Chart Software?
Whether you are just starting out, or if you are long-established in your area, Carepatron can help you take your nutrition or diet practice to the next level.
Reduce no-show appointments and prioritize your time using Carepatron’s automated SMS or email appointment reminders. Manage your team’s calendars, appointment scheduling, billing, payment management, and client lists all from within Carepatron’s intuitive platform.
Additionally, Carepatron allows you to offer your clients their own patient portal through which they can book appointments with you, or access documentation you want to share with them, such as our nutrition chart. You can find this nutrition chart, and hundreds of other useful templates, in Carepatron’s community template library. And if you can’t quite find the template you want, no problem, just create the template you want and share it with your team through Carepatron to save you from ever formatting a template again!
Carepatron also offers HIPAA-compliant, bank-level digitally encrypted data storage so you don’t need to worry about whether or not your client’s confidential information is secure. Further, not only is it secure, but it is also easily accessible to you and members of your team from Carepatron’s seamless desktop or mobile platforms. Try Carepatron today to see why 10,000+ healthcare practitioners around the world have entrusted Carepatron with their practice’s administration.
Commonly asked questions
Definitely not. Your client may have goals related to only their protein and total calorie intake, in which case, they should feel free to leave the other columns (Sodium, Fat, Sugar) blank. Similarly, some of your clients will not count calories as part of their nutrition plan, in which case, this column should be left blank too.
This is very common, particularly with take-away or restaurant meals where your client won’t necessarily know the ingredients. In this case, you can either look up the nutrition information for a similar meal or otherwise make an estimate. There will always be uncertainties in this kind of data, and the chart should be used as a tool to get a good picture of your client’s nutrition intake, but not taken as 100% accurate.
If the food item has a nutrition label, all the information your client needs to fill in the nutrition columns will be right there. Additionally, fruits, vegetables, grains, and many other staple foods have known nutritional information which is easily available on the internet, or you may wish to provide a list of common foods and their nutrition information to your client. Finally, if your client cannot find the nutrition information to fill out the column, they should feel comfortable to either make a guess or leave it blank- the goal is to get an idea of their nutrition intake, not to make them spend hours looking up nutrition information!
