Why you must keep a food journal
Don’t you love it when your views are vindicated by an objective third party?
I’m feeling smugly content because sciencedaily.com (love that site–because I’m all about scientific verification) posted a report today confirming that people who keep track of their food intake lose twice as much "weight" than those who don’t. (By "weight," I’m presuming the researchers mean "fat." That’s the only weight we want to lose.)
Here’s the blurb:
ScienceDaily (2008-07-08) — Study of nearly 1,700 participants shows that keeping a food diary can double a person’s weight loss. The study found that the best predictors of weight loss were how frequently food diaries were kept and how many support sessions the participants attended. Those who kept daily food records lost twice as much weight as those who kept no records.
This sounds like quite a well-crafted study. I recommend you read the full article.
The scientific report will be published in the August issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
I suspect the full report will mention that we humans are notoriously bad at 1. remembering what we’ve eaten, 2. estimating proper portion size, and 3. estimating the number of calories in a given portion.
People have a tremendous amount of resistance to the idea of keeping a food journal and/or counting calories. I hope that research like this will help overcome that resistance. I strongly recommend counting calories and keeping a food and activity journal–because these are strategies that really, truly work.
So here’s my challenge for you: are you getting the results you want from your nutrition program? If the answer is no, are you counting calories/keeping a journal? Are you willing to give it a try and see improved results?
You can make it easy on yourself by keeping track with a google or zoho spreadsheet.
Talk to me. What’s your experience?
Leave a comment if you’d like me to e-mail information on getting started with google and zoho spreadsheets. Both are free services.
