"What's measured improves." ~Peter Drucker
As you look at your goals for the year, is losing weight or eating more mindfully on your list? Well, one of the most powerful tools to help you succeed is a FOOD LOG. Ugh, boring, old-fashioned you say? Well, they WORK. You must have a baseline of what you eat and how much you exercise before you can improve on it. You might think you already know your habits, but you don't really until you keep track of it. I promise you will learn a lot by keeping a food diary for a week.
You can keep track of your eating on a piece of paper or use a digital food log. Here is a step-by-step guide on how to keep a food log, and why you should know your baseline (along with a printout for a paper food log). I always kept food logs on paper since I like to look at what I eat on a broader weekly view, but I recently tried a digital log (the Lose It! app), which worked like a charm. Review below.
After gaining some weight, I decided I needed to lose a few pounds. I tightened up my diet and focused on whole unprocessed foods, and ate more moderate portions. This always works. Then my husband started using Lose It! and I tagged along. It was easy, and it supercharged my weight loss so I lost twice the amount of weight in the same amount of time. I am a big believer in food logs, but even I was surprised by the results.
Why did I love Lose It!?
- Mainly because it was so easy to enter what I ate and the exercise I did. Lose It! has a huge database, so I could always find the exact or equivalent food or exercise I was entering. If it was a packaged food, the quickscan made data entry painless. Scan the code, and the exact food and its nutritional pop up. If I was cooking, I could enter a recipe, save it and access it again. Entering recipes was a little more difficult, but you can figure it out.
- Lose It is easy to set up. Enter your sex, height, weight, activity level and goals, and it will figure out how many calories you have per day.
- The Lose It! interface is intuitive. You log your weight, breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack and exercise on a daily basis.
- Some days you have to go out and celebrate. It happens. Lose It has a weekly net calorie calculation, so you can see how you are doing for the week, not just the day.
- You create a historical baseline. You don't know where you can eat more mindfully and cut back on calories until you have a baseline.
- Lose It! forecasts when you will hit your goal weight. This provides you with a tangible goal and lets you play around if you want to lose weight by a certain date.
The above review focuses on Lose It! since that is what I used, but MindfulEaters also loved MyNetDiary, which is another great digital food log.
What to do: Use a Food Log
- Don't know how to use a food log? Read this post.
- Choose a food log - you can use your notebook, print out this paper food log, use one of these recommended apps like Lose It! or MyNetDiary or any other digital method you would like.
- Be consistent! Enter in EVERYTHING you eat every day.
FAQ:
- Which digital app should I use? I tried MyNetDiary, which was similar to Lose It! I enjoyed it and could have used it too but I started Lose It! first and just stuck with it.
- Free or premium version? I tried both the free and premium versions of Lose It!, and the free version is fine with me. The premium version provides more nutritional analysis, and it will offer advice on food trends it observes in your diet. If you sign up for the free version, it will show you what the premium offer. Once you sign up for the free version, there are often sales for the premium version.
