Keeping a diet journal will help you lose more weight
Posted on May 6, 2009
Filed Under Lose Weight | Leave a Comment
Eating without noticing can really cause the calories to mount up and the pounds to pile on, but becoming aware of what we eat by recording it in a food diary can make a huge difference to weight loss success.
A food diary can make a huge difference to your weight loss simply by keeping you on a straight and narrow path by alerting you to the amount you are actually consuming. Many studies have found that simply by writing down what you consume throughout the day your calorie intake will be drastically reduced.
Faced with the thought of all that analyzing many people are put off keeping a food diary, but if you just try it for one day you will see how effective it is which will doubtless provide enough motivation to continue, not to mention how amazed you will be when you see how much food you are actually eating.
What to include in your journal
There are no hard a fast rules about what you should include in your food journal, but the more you put in the more you will get out of it.
1. The first thing you should do is write down your weight loss goal, make a contract with yourself that you are going to do everything you can to achieve this goal and sign it. Have a look at our free Weight Loss Success Planner at www.succeedatslimming.com, which has everything that a successful diet journal needs.
2. Write down your current vital statistics like your weight, body measurements and BMI and plot your progress every month. You could also add photographs of yourself so you can really see the transformation.
3. Write down everything you eat and drink, even tasters while cooking, or a bite of the kids’ sandwich – it all adds up these are the extra calories that went unnoticed before. It does still count even if it is not on a plate, even if the cookies are broken.
4. It helpful to write down what time you are eating foods, drinks and snacks so you can get an accurate pattern. Do you tend to consume sugary snacks at certain times of the day? This is all helpful information when altering your eating habits.
5. Also if you write down how you are feeling at those times of the day when you feel the impulse to eat you can become aware of emotional eating patterns. You could also record what you were doing when eating, for example; do you habitually eat potato chips which watching tv? With awareness you can bring rapid change to your lifestyle.
6. Instead of repeating the all or nothing strategy that many dieters find themselves employing time and again (and never succeeding), you could break your plan down into easily achievable steps. For example rather than giving yourself a calorie limit of say 1500 cals per day you could break it down into 400 for the morning, 500 for the afternoon and then 600 for the evening. And take it one day at a time adjusting along the way.
So now you have an accurate assessment of what you are consuming, how you feel when you consume those foods, where you are and what you were doing. You have a precise roadmap of what you want to achieve and how you are going to get there, and you have a motivating visual record of your journey.
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