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Whenever I’m really successful with losing weight—I mean consistently dropping 1-2 pounds per week for several months—I use a food diary. Usually, my food diary is one of the many choices online such as fitday or sparkpeople. If I’m not around a computer, I jot what I eat into my phone and then upload it into the computer later. This system really works for me. I can maintain and/or really slowly lose weight without a food diary, but if I want to shed pounds, then the food diary keeps me focused and on track. It seems that I’m not alone.
Dieters who write down everything they eat each day lose twice as much weight as those who don’t, according to one of the largest weight-loss studies ever conducted.
According to a new study found in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, dieters who kept a food diary lost an average of 18 pounds in 6 months while dieters who didn’t only lost 9 pounds. The big losers also attended weekly group sessions and exercised more than those who didn’t lose as much.
You might be saying that this is just a simple case of motivation: That those who worked harder at their diets lost more weight. And in part, I bet that’s true. But for me, and lots of people I know, looking at a list of the foods your eating (and their caloric values) have a tremendous impact on how successful a diet can be. Here are just a few reasons why I think food diaries can be helpful.
Food List as Motivator—If done right, a food list should provide you with certain targets to hit each day. Your targets should at least have the number of calories you’re supposed to eat each day.
Food List as Guilt Inducer—If you’re not doing well on a particular day, and you’re being honest with your food diary, when you see those chocolate chip cookies on the list from earlier in the day, you’ll find it harder to eat them again later in the day. When I tend to have a small lapse in diet judgement, it really helps me to get back on track when I’ve got my list going.
Food List as Nutrition Guide—By keeping a diary, you can track where your calories are coming from. This is especially helpful if you’ve adopted one of the many specialized diet plans out there such as Atkins, or The Zone diet. Even if you’re not on one of those diets, it’s still helpful to know how many calories your getting from the different types of foods: protein, carbohydrate and fat.
Food List as Secretary—I don’t necessarily use this very often, because I don’t often look into the past. But looking back at your diary to periods that were particularly successful for you might help to work through the tough times. And we all have tough times when we’re trying to lose weight.
Whatever the reasons may be, food diaries work for many people who want to lose weight. I think it’s time for me to start mine back up. Now…what did I have for breakfast this morning?
J.D.
16 responses so far ↓
1 Arien // Jul 16, 2008 at 9:09 am
First off…great blog. You’ve been inspiring me to finally get serious about my weight loss goals - 217 lbs to 195 lbs by December ‘08. I’m at 204 this morning.
OK…watching what you eat. Successful and motivating when I actually do it…but getting in the habit is hard.
A couple of tools I’ve discovered along the way that I’ve had varying degrees of success with:
http://www.traineo.com
- Nice web interface to put in calories burned, calorie intake…your account page will graphically show your data - it can be very motivating; invite others to motivate you, and motivate others; start your own traineo group, or join groups. Consider starting a group there…you have a decent following on the blog…let’s motivate each other!
http://www.tweetwhatyoueat.com
- leverage Twitter.com to enter in the foods you eat. Use the web interface, or sms your food into your account via cell phone.
2 Amber // Jul 16, 2008 at 9:52 am
This is true for me, too! I’m maintaining right now, but if I don’t record my food, my weight starts creeping up.
I love and use Sparkpeople!
3 Scott // Jul 16, 2008 at 10:52 am
What a great take on the food diary news.
I never thought of a food list as a secretary, but that’s exactly what we do in business. What I mean is that, you do a project. Then after your project, best practice states you do a follow-up to see what went well on the project and what didn’t so you can learn from your experience and move forward. Having a food diary, an exercise diary, and a weight diary as your secretary allow you to do the same thing. Go back in history to see when you were good and see what you were doing, eating, what exercises, etc. I like that idea.
As a shameless plug, I do hope you give our simpleweight.com site a try. We try to make weight loss simple.
thanks for the inspiration. As I have said in the past, I just love both this and the get rich slowly blogs.
4 red // Jul 16, 2008 at 10:56 am
I really need to do this, but I’ve been avoiding it because it’s such a hassle.
I’ve seen the rewards when you do this financially, but that’s done mostly automatically through purchasing with credit cards and having my filters figure out what expense that belongs to.
But I’d actually have to drag out my notebook for this and I’m not sure I want to add that to my daily routine. However, perhaps this extra action would stop me from eating bite size treats.
5 Summer Fey Foovay // Jul 16, 2008 at 11:09 am
I was advised to start keeping a food diary during a particularily bad period of my bipolar disease - turns out some foods seem to put some of us into that mood swing spiral thing. I also was having gall bladder problems. I kept mine in a simple spiral notebook, noting moods as well as food of course. Whatever your situation - a food diary can be a real revelation. You might find out all sorts of things besides weight is associated with food! I think it is an “awareness” thing - you don’t really think about each cookie - until you have to write them down (or record them otherwise) let alone notice “gee, everytime I eat such and such in a few hours I’m hyper/down” looking back over a couple weeks worth of food diary can be quite a revelation regarding your habits and the results of them.
6 another leanne // Jul 16, 2008 at 11:09 am
Thanks for the post; I was just thinking today about how helpful it was to keep a food diary (when I was actually doing it) and that I should revisit.
I notice you have used on-line versions, rather than just recording it all in a notebook you carry around. I’m curious if you’ve tried it both ways, and what the relative pros/cons of each might be? When I did this before, I was writing everything in a notebook, then looking up calorie counts online (at places like calorieking or freedieting’s “calories in food” tool) and jotting them down. Kind of a pain, but it seemed like this would be easier than jotting everything in the notebook, then having to transfer to a computer-based set-up. Am I making a mountain out of a molehill here?
Another question on the food diary… I’ve noticed that most sites providing calorie counts tend to offer a lot of information on either prepackaged/convenience food (X smoothie from Y chain contains Z calories) or on very basic ingredients (one cup of sliced green peppers has 18 calories), but as someone who cooks a lot of her own food and whose collection of cookbooks doesn’t often include nutrition information, I feel very much at a loss on how to calculate (easily!) the caloric content of any given dish. I’ve resorted to recording recipes in a place like recipezaar, just to get the nutrition info, but having to do so on an ongoing basis gets old; I keep thinking I’d much rather be riding my bike than typing a recipe in! Again, have you found a way to handle this conundrum on the food-diary front?
Total aside: I stumbled across this posting on a fitness blog, and thought you guys might be interested; he’s talking about how most strength training exercises aren’t perhaps the best ones for runners looking to help their form… Find it here: http://jamieatlas.wordpress.com/2008/07/15/runners-and-triathletes-3-exercises-that-are-guaranteed-to-help-you-run-better/
7 Andrew is getting fit // Jul 16, 2008 at 11:14 am
I have to agree with this. When I record I lose weight relatively easily. When I don’t then I still lose but very slowly.
8 Jenn // Jul 16, 2008 at 11:31 am
I have another good site to add to the discussion: http://www.peertrainer.com. I post what I eat with a group of my friends. What’s nice is that it’s a pretty open form so you can basically track whatever you want, including works, water, etc. I have friends who track cals, and I simply just write down what I eat.
9 Scott // Jul 16, 2008 at 12:00 pm
@another leanne
That was one of the reasons I built simpleweight. The idea is if you enter your recipes into a food system, you don’t have to do it the next time you eat the same food.
Other than that, the other suggestion I do is I just add the major recipe ingredients to my diet, and then add a factor for the left-overs.
For example, I was making a hummus dip for a party that I knew was only going to be a once in a while thing. Instead of entering the whole recipe, I just took the major items (chickpeas, olive oil, red peppers, cucumbers, feta, etc…) and adding them to my today’s food instead of building a recipe that I won’t use that much.
10 Desiree // Jul 16, 2008 at 12:59 pm
I use a cute moleskin notebook. It’s pretty small and fits in my pocketbook. Also has the little band to prevent opening. It was 12 dollars so I’d hate to mess it up by missing a day or forgetting to write in a cookie.
Later I use a CalorieKing program for Mac to input.
I also put my Garmin’s mileage and pedometer steps.
11 greenman2001 // Jul 16, 2008 at 2:40 pm
“I don’t often look into the past.” There’s an interesting statement.
You have a bit of a dilemma, Mac, because the system you’ve found to be most effective — writing down what you eat and how many calories — is also one that you find most difficult to maintain. The saving grace for you is that you don’t seem to be gaining weight when you DON’T write down what you’re eating — in other words, you’re successful at maintaining your weight more or less automatically. So the only benefit to using the method that works for you consistently is that you’d lose the weight you want to lose more quickly. That doesn’t seem like much of a benefit considering the other stuff you’re juggling in your everyday life. You have systems in place for managing stress, raising your kids, keeping your house, dealing with boredom, cooking for your family and so forth. Writing down what you eat is possible within your routine, but only for short periods of time. That’s when you lose weight. It’s a pretty good system, I think — not always pretty, but it works well enough. You’re quite close to your weight goal now. I think it got easier for everyone — you and those of us who have been following your progress — when you let go of the 1.5-2 lb. a week weight loss goal. Now you’re much more in line with the subjects of the study you mention: 3/4 of a lb. per week (with a food diary). It all sounds very sensible to me.
Soon you’re going to reach your weight loss goal, and you’ll be faced with the question of how to maintain your weight. All of the stressors that cause you to eat too much — stress and boredom — are going to remain in place, along with all the stay-at-home Dad responsibilities that make it hard to be consistent in eating well and exercising. It seems like applying the food diary quickly and for short periods of time when you see your weight creep up 3-4 lbs would be an effective way of maintaining. I like it.
12 Rachel // Jul 16, 2008 at 8:10 pm
I love spark people but I find it hard to keep up with since I am not always around the computer. I really tend to just go with pen and paper. But you are right when you write it all down you actually see what you are eating where as if you don’t keep track many times you forget half of what went into your mouth for the day.
13 Sheamus // Jul 17, 2008 at 5:19 pm
I think the main reason why a food diary works - and why I often come back to one even though I always grow to hate them - is because they keep you honest. Much like running without having any real idea of how far or how long you’ve been going versus using a Garmin or similar, if you guesstimate your calories you will inevitably cheat yourself. You’ll also forget stuff and even go as far as having little ‘extras’ simply because you won’t have to account for them at the end of the day.
When you have to jot it all down and click on the button to add it all up, it’s depressing to find you’ve confumed 43 billion calories when you thought you only had two twigs and a cup of water broth. Once you’ve done it for a week or so you will cheat a lot less, if at all, simply because the journal keeps you keen, mean and, by default, lean.
I always used Calorie-Count.com, which I found had a really exhaustive list of foods, plus let you easily add your own.
I haven’t used a journal for a while as I have a pretty good grip on my nutrition now but I can imagine going back to it in the future, and I certainly will if I can’t shift some of this muscle mass that came from years of lifting weights, but is now limiting me as a runner. Why? For the same reasons above; while I think I’m getting 50g or less protein a day, I don’t really know. A journal would keep me on the straight and narrow.
14 Sheamus // Jul 17, 2008 at 5:23 pm
I should also add that I don’t think just writing stuff down on paper or keeping a simple log on a computer is enough - you need to know the real details, particularly calories and fat, otherwise it’s just words on a page and doesn’t really tell you anything.
15 Fitness Insights blog // Jul 20, 2008 at 2:25 pm
The food diary can be an amazing tool but not only in a calorie counting way.
Some foods we eat can work better with our own individual chemistry than others, and some foods can cause us to bloat up and gain more weight than others.
If we are able to keep track of our food as well as how we feel after each meal then we can get a deeper insight into how our body is really responding to what we are eating.
Jamie
16 Elaine // Jul 22, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Yay for Spark People!
I’ve also used NutriBase and iShape, and Spark People is the one program that I actually consistently use and return to. It’s just so easy because it’s free and you don’t have to worry about backing up your custom foods database.
But, even just jotting down and adding up what you eat in a notebook has to help. I like the web apps though, being one of those people who’s on the internet practically 24/7…
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