Dieters Boost Their New Year Resolution to Lose Weight with a Food Journal
One sure fire way to boost your New Year's resolution to lose weight is to keep a food journal. This is a great way to keep track of everything you eat and drink and will show you exactly how you are progressing or otherwise!
It's a really effective way of monitoring your progress and highlighting everything you consume each day while you are dieting.
You can use it to get an accurate assessment of how you're doing and where you might be making mistakes without realizing, or when you're doing everything right and giving yourself the best possible chance of success!
Write it All Down!
The trick to keeping a food journal is to literally list everything that passes your lips, leaving nothing out. That includes that sneaked candy bar when you thought no one was looking!
Of course, you really do have to be totally honest with yourself, because the food journal is yours and yours alone to see. It's not for anyone else, so if you cheat by not entering an item of food that you know you shouldn't have eaten, the only person you are cheating is yourself!
You can make your own food diary by getting a regular full size diary with a full page per day and simply list everything that you eat from the moment you get up in the morning to the last thing before you go to bed at night. Seeing as you are on a diet of some description, you shouldn't be getting up in the night to raid the fridge, so there should be no entry in there for overnight!
Seeing is Believing!
Keeping a weight loss food journal will help you to see in black and white exactly what you are eating on a day to day basis. It's not easy to ignore what you have written down in front of you, after all!
The great thing about it is that you can go further by including as much information about each food item that you can. Such as the portion size or weight/volume and the number of calories it contains and anything else you want to add, such as fat content, whether carbohydrate, protein or fat and its dietary fiber content if you know it.
This will build up into a really useful catalog of your diet and you should also include, at the end of each week, your weight so that you can see how well your diet is working for you!
It also gives you the opportunity to tweak your daily diet to see if changing one item of food for another makes a difference to how much weight you're losing over a given period of time. You can also log the times that you eat and the length of time you stretch between meals.
This is useful if you're looking to try intermittent fasting overnight by scheduling your last meal of the day at an earlier time, then eating your first meal next day some time later to maximize the fasting window. It's quite incredible how much of a boost this can give your weight loss efforts as well as all the health benefits that accompany this strategy.
Happy New Year and may it bring you everything that you wish for!
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Posted on Sat, 01 Jan 2011 in News | 0 Comments