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So, keeping a weight loss diary, or, in another way, a food diary – is an effective tool for those who want to keep their weight normal. Such a diary is an excellent motivation for a healthy lifestyle.
How to start keeping a weight loss diary?
Your diary and its maintenance should cause you positive emotions. Therefore, get the most beautiful notebook or notebook. In the diary of weight loss, you need to write down every day what was eaten for the day.
You need to be clear about your goal in order to record your progress. This will give you the motivation to finish what you started.
At the beginning of the diary, we recommend describing your parameters:
- weight,
- height,
- volumes,
- goals that you set for yourself.
For example, your goal is to lose 5 kg, get rid of cellulite, pump up your tummy, etc.
To more clearly see the changes, you need to sometimes paste photos into the diary, so over time the diary will turn into a photo album, which you can proudly show to your friends later. An interesting feature of the weight loss diary is that you can keep both a real diary written on paper or in Excel, and a virtual one, for example, on our website Calorizator.ru.
Ways to keep a food diary
Fill out a weight loss diary every day. You need to enter in it your current weight as of the morning, all the food eaten, as well as physical activity. This is done in order to analyze how much you moved, whether it is enough to achieve the desired goals.
There are two ways to keep a diary:
- Record all meals, including snacks, after the fact or
- plan your diet from the evening.
Each method has its pros and cons. Writing down the fact, you will be able to control the daily caloric content and bzhu, but you risk misjudging the caloric content of a particular dish, and go beyond the limits. Planning your diet in the evening will help you avoid such troubles, but you will have to strictly follow your plan, showing resistance to temptations. Choose which method is more convenient for you.
Important rules for keeping a diary
An important rule when filling out such a food diary is, of course, honesty. With this accounting of the food consumed per day, you will eat much less. After all, writing down a pack of cakes that you ate in proud solitude, and then also the weight gain that appeared in the morning, you are likely to bypass the confectionery department another time.
It will be good if you make a habit in your diary to indicate the reason for using the product, for example: I was very hungry, I wanted to eat or ate just out of boredom. After a while, you will see how often you eat not because of hunger at all. For example, daily tea parties at work for the company with employees, with sweets, cake, cookies…
What is the use of a food diary?
Often we do not attach importance, and sometimes even forget about those products that we grabbed on the go in order to have a snack or chew on nothing to do. For such snacks, we often use sweets, chocolates, sandwiches, fast food, and so on. It seems that there is nothing wrong with this, but if you have a habit of such snacks, you just need to start a weight loss diary.
Starting to keep a diary, you can be very surprised by previously unnoticed snacks-food interceptions. Thanks to the diary, no product should go unnoticed. Any changes, whether they are positive or negative, you can easily track by looking in your diary, and use them to correct your diet. Therefore, it is difficult to overestimate the benefits of a food diary.
Among other things, keeping a food diary is very exciting and very useful. Many of us think that their memory is fine, that they remember everything that was eaten during the day. Well, a bottle of Coca-Cola with a small chocolate bar can not be taken into account, this is a trifle. It is useless to justify yourself when the food you have eaten during the day is clearly recorded in your diary.
Mistakes when keeping a weight loss diary
Many people keep a weight loss diary incorrectly, which is why they do not get the result they expect. The most common mistakes are irregularity, incorrect labeling of products, determining portions by eye, and lack of conclusions.
- Irregularity – you can evaluate the benefits of a diary over a long period of time. It is impossible to understand your eating behavior in one day, to see and correct mistakes in nutrition. To adjust your diet, you need to make notes every day for at least two weeks.
- Incorrect labeling of products is a common mistake among those who keep an online diary, when they enter a ready-made dish prepared by someone unknown when and by whom in their diet. The calorie counters list the standard recipe options, but you never know for sure what ingredients and in what quantity the author used. Similarly prepared porridges, meat and fish dishes, vegetables. In the process of cooking, all products change their volume and it is impossible to match the unknown author of the recipe. Therefore, for the accuracy of calculations, use the Recipe Analyzer and make your own base of dishes or take into account the initial weight of raw and bulk products.
- Determining the portion by eye is never accurate. Overweight people tend to underestimate the amount of food they eat. And there are no built-in scales in the human body that would allow you to determine the actual weight of the product. In order not to be deceived, it is better to buy a kitchen scale.
- The lack of conclusions is the reason for most failures. If you see that the cake makes you go beyond the calorie limit, then why buy it again and again?
After a short period of time, for example, once a week, carefully review your records, analyze the benefits and harms of those products that have entered your diet for a week, evaluate their impact on your weight and health.
The convenience of an electronic food diary
The site has a Personal Account, which is very convenient to keep a food diary. You can not only count calories and plan your diet, but also track the results using tables and graphs.
Thanks to this diary, you will clearly see how the process of your weight loss is going, whether you are approaching the ideal weight for you or moving away. Enjoy the achievements, analyze the failures, especially since all the data is always at hand, and you do not need to remember what and when you ate.
Believe me, as soon as you start keeping your diary, you will understand how interesting, useful and convenient this habit is. Thanks to this diary, you can easily control your diet and make your dreams of health and a slim figure come true.