PrintBy Shawn McKee
eDiets Contributor
There are so many small changes you can make to lose weight, but there’s one tweak that can actually double your weight-loss efforts. You don’t have to wake up at 5 a.m. or give up cheese to do it, but you will have to take accountability for what you eat.
According to one of the largest and longest running weight-loss trials ever conducted, the secret to doubling your weight loss is simple: Keep a journal of everything you eat — everything.
Whether you scribble it down in a notebook, log it in your Blackberry or use an online food tracker like eDiets Nutrition Tracker, you’ll be keeping yourself honest and your diet on track.
“The more food records people kept, the more weight they lost,” said the study’s lead author Jack Hollis, Ph.D. “Those who kept daily food records lost twice as much weight as those who kept no records. It seems that the simple act of writing down what you eat encourages people to consume fewer calories.”
It seems that writing down everything you consume forces you to realize where calories are coming from, and it gets you thinking about what you eat, which leads to accountability as well as a realization of where hidden calories are showing up. Every trip to the vending machine, every cookie you sneak from the cookie jar, every soda you gulp when no one is looking — write it down.
“Journaling your food intake isn’t just about what you eat but also how much you eat,” says Registered Dietitian Nicole Bengtson, LD/N. “You may not realize that the bag of chips you just ate had two servings in it, meaning what you thought was 140 calories was actually 280 calories.”
For example, if you normally eat an entire bag of chips five days a week with your lunch and then cut it down to half a bag (one serving), you’ll shave off 700 calories a week from your intake. This could lead to a 10-pound weight loss in a year (1 pound every five weeks)!
Don’t leave journaling your food intake until the end of the day either – you’re much more likely to “forget” what you ate, says Bengtson. Try to log your foods as soon as possible after you eat them – what and how much you eat is most important. But you may also want to include what time you ate to identify your meal patterns, as well as what you were feeling. This can help you identify if you were eating because you were really hungry or you were eating because you were bored, angry or stressed.
By taking a few minutes after every meal to realize what you just ate, you’re likelier to make small changes like sticking to the serving size on the bag of chips. And when you add up all these small changes, you’ll end up with one big change in the form of doubling your weight loss!
Do you have a small change that adds up big at the end of the year? Post it below and let us know!
Email Page
