When I was in my most active period of weight loss a few years ago, I would write down whatever food and portion I ate immediately and put it into my Palm. I used a weight loss and diet software weight loosing program called WW Journal (no longer available due to legal issues with Weight Watchers), which allowed me to write down the foods I ate and their portions.
Then, using calorie, fat, and other nutritional information, the weight loosing program helped me calculate the Weight Watchers points.When I got to my allotted points portion for the day, I stopped eating. No exceptions. On the weeks that I diligently kept a food diary in this manner, I lost weight. On the weeks when I didn’t do this, either by estimating food portions or by not writing things down when I ate them and then guessing later, I didn’t know whether I stayed in my points total, and I was much less successful on those weeks.
Over time, I wanted more power, something that analyzed the foods I ate and told me the number of calories I ingested, the percentage of calories from fat, the vitamin intake, and more. I also wanted something that told me how I was doing over time, not just one day or one week at a time. So I started looking for a better diary that worked with my PC.
It’s been proven in many studies that you eat less when you write down what you eat. A recent study by the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center showed that women on average underreported their calories by 500 per day. Men were better, and heavier people were the worst guessers. For whatever reason, if you write down what you’ve eaten or what you’re about to eat, you’ll eat less. Part of the reason for this is because once you see how many calories something contains, you’ll automatically eat less. It’s also because you don’t want to disappoint yourself by eating too much.
Also, you learn by analyzing. A food diary shows you what you eat and when you eat it. That’s informative in itself. If you know that you tend to have a mid-afternoon snack each day, perhaps you can change from M&Ms to some peanuts or fruit. If you know that you’re eating 3,000 calories per day when you thought you were eating 2,000, you’ll make the changes necessary to get those calories down.
However, the difference between a handwritten food diary and an electronic one is like the difference between a paper check register and Quicken. It’s one thing to balance your checkbook each month; it’s quite another to analyze your spending and get reports that show you where the money went and when. Think of an electronic food diary as a very powerful version of Quicken for your health and fitness.
The most powerful part of an electronic food diary is its nutritional analysis and reporting capabilities. As long as the food that you’re eating is in its database, a good food diary weight loosing program will tell you how many calories you ate, what percentage came from fat, what vitamins you got, and so on. And like Quicken, a good reporting capability will show you, graphically, how you’re doing over time.
Also, although we call these products food diaries, they also help you track your fitness levels as you enter in the exercise you do each day. Some of the weight loosing programs give you extra credit for this, allowing you to eat more calories if you exercise more. FitDay, a weight loss and diet software- and Web-based food diary product discussed later in this article, offers seven reasons for keeping a food diary:
Electronic food diaries come in several forms. You can use a Web site, a weight loss and diet weight loss and diet software weight loosing program on your computer, or a weight loosing program on your PDA. Some weight loosing programs are a combination of two or all of these options. In addition to FitDay, a number of other very good food diary weight loss and diet software products are available.
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02252010
1. Hope from a Diet Supplement
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