We’ve all tried to lose weight at some point in our lives. Whether it’s because we don’t like the way our body looks or because our doctor said our weight was negatively affecting our health, we’ve all been there.
Sometimes weight loss is necessary to our improve health. The article here discusses how obesity increases cardiovascular disease risk factors and City of Hope describes obesity as one of the greatest lifestyle risk factors for cancer here. So, weight loss can be important of our race toward healthy.
But just like we’ve all tried to lose weight at some point in our lives, I’m sure we’ve struggled with it too. I know I have.
A few years ago, my doctor told me that my body fat percentage was too high. Not a fun thing to hear but I wasn’t surprised. My eating habits had not been great. So, I made some changes to my eating and slowly saw some improvements.
The thing that made the biggest difference for me and allowed me to both lose some weight, and more importantly to change poor eating habits, was recording my food.
Multiple research articles have described the benefits of recording what you eat for weight loss. The article here describes that people who logged in to record their food more times per day and logged more days per month lost more weight than those who had less logins per day/month.
So, research supports logging your food for weight loss, but what did this look like practically for me?
First, the habit took a long time to form. I started logging my food about 6 years ago. I’d do it for a while, and then get away from it. But I kept at it. And now I’m logging 5 days a week consistently. And the more I log, the better my results. So if this is something you want to start, start small. (See my post here.) Try logging 1 day per week or 1 meal per day. To make this a consistent part of your life you need to gradually add it to your routine.
Second, recording my food made me aware of portion sizes. How many of you have ever taken a bag of chips to the couch? I’m guilty of this! When we don’t pay attention to how much we are eating, we end up eating more calories than we need and this leads to weight gain. When I started recording my food I had to start paying attention to how much of each thing I was eating. Who knew I’d be counting my tortilla chips?!
Third, recording my food reduced my snacking, especially at night. When you’ve eaten and recorded your food for the day, you can’t mindlessly pull out the ice cream after dinner. And that leads to eating less foods that aren’t usually rich in nutrients and overall eating less calories.
There are lots of apps you can use to record your food. I use the free My Fitness Pal app. You can even record your food with good ol’ fashioned pen and paper. Just writing down what you eat and how much you eat provides a great source of accountability. And it will make you more aware of the areas or even times of day you struggle to eat well.
But let me remind you, start small. Recording my food is a habit that I’ve been working on for a long time and that I continue to work on. And remember that habits that stick are built over time.