The Diet Logs

Does writing down what you eat help you when you are dieting? Many people believe that keeping a food diary is well worth the trouble since it is easy to forget just how much or what we eat during the day. A food diary can really keep you on track with your diet.

There are several free tools that can be used to help you keep track of what you eat. What works best for me is to keep it simple. I like to keep a plain notebook and jot down what I eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. I do not worry so much with calories but just writing down what I eat. At the end of the day, I then go back and fill in the calorie information. This does a couple of things for me. First is that I don’t have to stop in the middle of my day and look up calories for an item. Next is that I don’t obsess over having only 500 calories left for dinner. Most days I do stay within my calorie goal simply by looking at what I’ve eaten and having a rough idea as to how many calories each item has.

Sometimes if I know I only have to many calories left during the day, then nothing in that caloric range sounds appealing. However, if I don’t know exactly how many calories I have left, then those same items do not sound so bad. It’s psychological I know but works for me.

If you are on a certain diet plan, then that diet might have a special food diary you can buy as a supplement. It might provide some good information that you can have at your fingertips.  If you do keep a notebook, make a page especially for 100 calorie snacks. Take some time and go through your favorite foods to figure out just how many you can have that will equal a 100 calorie snack. This is especially depressing because some things I like I can only have two cookies. I do not have that much willpower, so I mark those off my list and leave items that have at least a serving size of 15 or so.

Keeping a food diary can be a very important tool when trying to lose weight. Tracking what you eat will help you make better choices and pinpoint eating weaknesses in your diet.

Lynn Little wrote this on July 18th, 2007 and filed it under Diet Logs |