One of the most looked over things when you’re trying to lose some weight, is knowing exactly what and how much food you are eating, you can to a certain extent roughly guess how much food you are eating in a day, by simply writing down the calories on the side of the food item or where ever it may be. But also it’s not just that as well it’s what you are eating.

Eating food predominately tends to be a what I would call a unconscious process mostly, you tend to eat what you like the taste, of as we all do. This is all very well but sometimes we can tend to cheat on ourselves and stray with our eating habits.

Which is why it’s a good idea to write down what you eat every day, or even plan your meals so you know for a fact then the you’re only eating what you should be eating rather than what you shouldn’t be eating. T

his particular idea of writing down what you eat has been around for a very long time now, but it’s probably, I dare say that something that we very often don’t do probably due to the fact that it requires a bit of effort, and something that we don’t particularly think that we need to do.

However a study that was instigated recently by Dr Victor J. Stevens, who is a researcher at Kaiser Permanente Center was quoted as saying that we don’t particularly like to write down what we are eating it’s not that much fun but it has been proven that it does work.

In a study which was in their August publication they followed 1700 people, who were either overweight and/or obese both men and women. And their overall average weight was 212 pounds or 15 stone& and two pounds, the participants were asked to attend 20 group weekly meetings. And also told to consume 500 calories less than they would be eating normally, which is what you would eat.

in order to lose one pound of fat per week through a combination of exercise and calorie deficit. They were told to do moderate exercise of 30 minutes per day follow a low-fat fat diet which comprised of fruit and vegetables mainly.

They were asked to record what they ate and how many minutes of exercise they did as well, after a five-month period they lost on average 13 pounds of weight, and the surprising thing is that they more that they recorded their food intake the more weight that they lost. Those who didn’t keep a record of what they were eating lost nine pounds, whereas the people who kept to their food journals, and did it over a six-day period, lost 18 pounds of weight.

That is double the amount of weight which is quite a big difference I am sure you will agree. So what is the magic ingredient that makes this work so well the researchers seem to think that it is because, you are being accountable for what it is you are actually doing, when you are writing things down you can actually see where things are coming from, such as access calories etc.

As far as exercise is concerned you can probably see where you have or haven’t been doing it, because after a while if you don’t incorporate exercise into your lifestyle it can tend to drop off you either get bored or simply can’t be bothered to do it so it goes to the wayside. One of the tips that the researchers gave was write down what you have eaten after you have eaten it, use your PDA or you can write e-mail a to yourself, use pen and paper or use post-it notes. Here is why it can help.

• The actual process of keeping the diary this will make you realise what you should not be eating
• You could be eating out a lot and not realise things that you were eating
• There may be certain eating patterns or habits that you may not realise that you have, as I have said before eating food can largely be a unconscious process this will help you stamp out those unnecessary habit patterns which can be very ingrained.
• You could be comfort eating without even realising it this is something that a lot of people do tend to struggle with as far as weight loss is concerned.
• It will make you far more accountable for the food that you are eating.
• Over a period of time you will be able to see trends and spot them, which will help you understand what is and isn’t working.

Here are some sites that you can use which are free online food diaries and calorie counters as well.

http://www.foodfocus.co.uk/
http://www.fitday.com/
http://www.my-calorie-counter.com/
http://www.nutridiary.com/
http://www.iowaavenue.com/ 

Source http://health.msn.com 

Tags: calories, food

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