Keeping a Food Journal

Here's validation to what I've been telling you for some time: Keeping a detailed food journal will help you lose weight.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25573436/

according to a new study that found that people who kept daily food diaries lost twice as much weight or more as those who didn’t keep a tally of their meals.

“There’s a myth in this country now that weight loss is almost impossible and very few can lose weight,” said Victor Stevens, a researcher at Kaiser’s Center for Health Research in Portland, Ore., and co-author of the study, which appears in the August issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

“But we showed that with a simple, straightforward approach, nearly 70 percent of participants were able to lose enough weight to make significant improvements in their health.”

Overall, two-thirds of the study subjects lost nine pounds or more during the six-month study. But those who kept a food diary every day of the week dropped up to 20 pounds, more than twice as much as those who didn't record their every bite.

 “It had a very big impact,” Satterwhite said of the diary. “If I was walking through the kitchen and wanted to grab a cookie or a brownie, I would think twice because I knew I had to write it down.”

That was a common experience among those who kept diaries, noted Stevens. “Study participants said, ‘I thought about eating a second helping of chocolate cake but I didn’t because I didn’t want to see it in my food diary,” he said.

The food diaries helped people see where extra calories were coming from, and also to recognize the hidden calories in familiar foods.

Satterwhite said it was easier to maintain the weight loss using the food diary than her past efforts using Slim-Fast, the Atkins high-protein regime or other fad diets.

“The difference was that it was a slower stable lifestyle change than doing some crash diet that you see on TV or read about in a magazine,” she said.

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