Keep a Diary For Weight Loss
Keep a Diary For Weight Loss
Weight Loss/Cellulite Help and Tips
- Try to keep a food diary
- The healthy way of eating
- How to use portion control
Be Honest With Yourself
Keeping a food diary is a perfect beginner step in maintaining your eating habits. By having one of these, it will help you visualize why you eat what you eat, which is a very important factor considering that you are interested in maintaining a long-term weight management program for yourself.
The most significant part of keeping a food diary is to make it real and honest. There have been studies showing that mostly women tend to stretch the truth a little when keeping personal food record coming up short by average of 900 calories.
Why even have a diary based on this if you going to lie to yourself? Keep in mind that it is ONLY YOU that is going to see this diary. So, be as truthful as possible.
This is What You Should include:
Below is a brief example of a food diary page:
- Calories, carbs, fat grams and protein..etc.
- Personal Caution and Danger Zones
- Your authentic honest/real reasons for eating (besides eating out of plain hunger)
- Cravings and Appetite
- The sizes of your portions
- How do you feel after you eat?
Treat yourself and go to a bookstore. Get a book or two on Foods and Calories. Nutritional books as well. Stay educated on this subject. It will help you stay focused and increase your will power to succeed in losing weight.
Keep an organized chart on your wall or on the computer with various columns naming the foods and nutrients you are using and or need. By staying organized and seeing this chart everyday, it will boost your confidence naturally.
Try writing down exactly how much you eat throughout the entire day.
( Most people overeat and do not even realize this )
Maybe you will soon realize that this is where all of that extra weight is coming from.
Do not go crazy with measuring cups and scales right off the bat. Why make yourself go nuts early in the beginning? You will get frustrated and quit. Keep mental notes on what you are doing and remember to portion everything. Just visualize what you are about to eat and then ask yourself if this is too much or too little.
*NOTE* Even a quick, brief record of an estimate of something simple like how many cookies or sodas you had may be enough to wake you up and stick with your diary plan. Even if you are off a bit, it is still much better to have some record than zero record and knowledge at all.
After some time goes by, you will naturally make this a good habit. It will come natural to you to jot down important things into your diary. It will become 2nd nature.
*NOTE* ( A habit usually forms after 20 days of repeating the same thing over and over )
The emotional Eater
If you catch yourself eating when you are not hungry, spend a little quality time reflecting why you did what you did. Immediately afterwards, write down the exact reasons, in your own words, why you ate (hunger, boredom, etc.) and the way you were feeling afterwards (guilty, depressing, jealous .. etc.). You may find it extremely helpful to view this in your diary when you tend to overeat so you can plan for the future to arrange other activities that will take your mind off of eating.
Below are excellent examples of personal questions you could ask yourself when you eat for emotional reasons:
- Before you ate, what were your feelings?
- Was there a gut feeling of hunger?
- Were you with anyone else at the time?
- Did you eat quickly or relaxed?
- Do you remember exactly what you ate?
- Were the portions of food normal or way out there?
- Were you occupied doing something else while you were eating?
- What are your exact feelings at this very moment? (ex: don’t care, satisfied, healthy, guilty)?
- In your final opinion, was this worth it?
You will see quicker than you can realize that writing down and acknowledging these questions and answers truthfully and honestly will go way beyond in helping you not only understanding about yourself more but also helping you to prevent emotional eating altogether.
You will be grateful after some time when creating a food diary especially when you see the great results from it. You will most likely ask yourself why you never did this before.
It works ! You just have to go and start it NOW, not Later!
Thank You For Reading This.
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