Lose Weight - Keep a Food Log or Diary

Keeping a food diary or "food log" is a useful tool in losing weight and getting healthy. Having to be accountable to yourself for every bite you put in your mouth can be motivating, not to mention eye-opening! Logging your intake in a food diary allows you to:

Track calories and other nutrition details: once you calculate how many calories per day are appropriate for you, as you log your food intake you can see how many you have left for the day and plan your meals accordingly.

Evaluate your diet's make-up: seeing the breakdown of your nutritional intake in a food diary allows you to clearly see if it's balanced enough. Do you need more protein? Less sodium or fat? A food log makes easy work of assessing this.

Get a heavy dose of reality: most of us underestimate the amount we eat. Seeing it in plain black and white in a food diary makes it tough to deny and prompts us to reconsider everything we put in our mouths.

Gain a better understanding of portion sizes: food diary programs allow you to choose the portion size either by piece, weight or volume. It's sobering when you type a meal into your food log and realize you ate enough portions for two people!

Assess the reasons behind overeating: what was your mood when you ate that big dessert? Sad, happy, depressed? Were you alone or with others? What were you doing -- sitting at the table? Watching TV? A food log helps you isolate the triggers of overeating so you can try to avoid them.

Identify trouble foods: you can make notes in most food logs, which will allow you to record how you feel after eating certain foods. This can help you identify those foods which do not increase your energy, or cause bothersome symptoms.

Highlight lapses: over time, keeping a food diary will reveal patterns in your eating. This helps to zero in on weak times, so that we can then adjust our eating habits to avoid binging.

Provides a record: when consulting a doctor or dietician regarding weight loss and nutrition, it can be helpful to have a hard copy of a food log in hand.

I have personally found a food diary to be an indispensable tool in my weight control program. Seeing how much I really eat on a daily basis helps keep me in check; every time I think about overindulging I know I will have to enter it in my food log and that motivates me to only eat what I need instead of what I want.

While you can certainly choose to make your food log the old-fashioned way -- ink and paper -- there are many online options from which to choose. These make the job easier, especially if you're on the computer frequently throughout the day, and they also automatically calculate your intake, nutritional make-up of your diet, allow you to enter your work-out information and many other options which give you an overall picture of your nutrition and exercise habits. Happy logging!

Find a free food log or diary at these sites:

Fitday.com

Nutridiary.com

Mycaloriecounter.com

Sparkpeople.com