Can a Food Diary double your
weight loss?

Keeping a food diary can help you double your weight loss - at least that's what these researchers say.

Researchers at Kaiser Permanente's Center for Health Research concluded that a weight loss diary can do wonders for weight loss.

At the 6-month mark, participants who had kept a weight loss diary for 6 days of the week had lost about 18 pounds compared to those who only lost 9 pounds and didn't keep a weight loss diary. (The average weight loss was 13 pounds)

I'm intrigued that researchers attribute the difference merely to keeping a food record because the research also showed that those who lost the most also went to weekly support meetings and did about 5 hours of exercise a week compared to the average who only did about 2 hours a week.

And I'd imagine that either of those things could have accounted for the difference as well. So, I can't help wondering, did keeping a food diary also help them exercise more or help them become more committed to attending support classes?

One of the authors of the study which will appear in the August 2008 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Victor Stevens, says that keeping a food record is a "technique that changes your behavior."

The almost 1700 participants of the study done in Portland Oregon were asked to:

• Follow a diet with plenty of vegetables, fruits and low- or non-fat

dairy.• Write down what they ate and when
• Set calorie budgets and keep running totals of their calories consumed

A food diary is one of the basic components of The Mind over Fatter program because keeping a food diary:

makes you more aware of what goes into your mouth - we often eat mindlessly. But when we're suddenly faced with having to write down that half a cookie, or that handful of crisps, it brings it into our awareness, and gives us a chance to consider if we do really want it, or why we're eating it.

and it gives us a chance to look logically at what we're eating to see what patterns we notice?

Personally though, if you're going to keep a food diary, I'd suggest you add a few other columns to include the 'where' and 'why' of eating.

I think the 'where' is important because we often don't realize how conditioned our eating is. For example - if you continually finding you're writing down: "At Sue's house" or "in front of the TV" you may need to ask yourself a few questions like: why there? Because it's often in answering those questions that you're able to change them.

This is important to discover the reason behind your eating. Am I eating breakfast because I'm physically hungry? Have I just had an argument? Am I feeling lonely? Am I feeling celebratory. When you see the patterns behind the 'why' you may discover that one of the reasons you eat for is actual physical hunger.

The downside to keeping a food diary:

It can make you focus much more on food, rather than on living and that's fine so long as that's a temporary measure. But if it makes you obsess over every little thing you're eating then a food diary isn't for you.

As far as I'm concerned, a food record should only be used as an awareness tool kept for a relatively short space of time because becoming obsessive about it is the kind of behavior that leads to eating disorders. .

It can be time consuming and a hassle. But hey - it can also be a life-changing tool.

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