Keeping a food journal

One of the many factors to successful weight loss includes keeping a daily journal. Just how do you keep a food journal and how hard is it?

Food Journals

As I started with the 6 week diet and fitness program, I was confronted with the food journal idea. It is recommended that you keep a record of everything that you eat throughout the day, how you felt when you ate, and where and when you ate.

By keeping tabs on all the factors, you may be able to see certain patterns in the way that you eat and perhaps change a few things around in an effort to cut calories. For example, if you start feeling very tired in the afternoons, and this eventually leads to eating non-necessary calories, perhaps you can change your routine in the afternoon to combat the tiredness and the subsequent intake of calories.

There is always the chance of taking a mid-afternoon power nap, or you can perhaps have a cup of green tea or coffee to ward off the afternoon munchies that come.

I started keeping a food journal, and quickly realized that it can be very difficult and time-consuming, especially when you don’t have a bag or box to look at that tells you the calories. Then you have to go about estimating calories, which can sometimes be difficult.

There are many online sources that can give you calories of many common foods, depending on how you cooked them. These resources are great for tabulating caloric intake for each day.

After starting my daily food journal, I quickly realized that some of the choices I make have a lot of calories. For example, I love the Chipotle steak burrito. It is packed full of meat, lettuce, tomato, cheese, sour cream and corn. You could say that the burrito is healthy with all of those ingrediants. Yet, when I estimate the number of calories in the burrito, I came up with about 1000 calories. That’s a lot of calories.

So if I decide to eat the burrito now, I will probably decide to eat it a few hours after the lunch hour and then not eat anything the rest of the day. It is filling enough for me that I can go most of the day without eating if I have one of these.

Anyways, statistics show that you are 2 to 3 times more likely to reach your weight loss goals and maintain your weight if you keep a food journal of everything that you eat and drink during the day.

For additional information on Weight Loss programs and plans, visit the Weight Loss Advisory.