There’s a weight loss secret everyone should know: the secret is to keep a daily food diary.
Yes, I know, I know. Keeping a food diary is a drag. It’s boring. It’s tedious and tiresome and very time consuming. I don’t like writing a daily food diary any more than you do… but I know from experience that I couldn’t manage my diet without it.
Writing a daily food diary is like managing a checkbook. Each day you start out with a balance of 1600 calories (or the number of calories you’ve established as your maximum daily calorie level). You deduct from the calorie balance as you consume food during the day. It forces you to make decisions about the deductions you want to make from your balance.
| Food Eaten |
Calories |
| Total calories to spend | 1600 |
| Strawberry yogurt smoothie | -350 |
| Handful of cashews | -90 |
| Salad with roasted chicken | -450 |
| Lara Bar | -180 |
| Plain Hamburger |
-450 |
| Carrots | -80 |
| Calories over or under budget | 0 |
Do you want to eat a Krispy Kreme Glazed Yeast Doughnut (200 calories) and a cup of coffee for a quick 200-calorie breakfast on your way out the door in the morning or would it be a better choice to have a cup of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes (100 calories) topped with 1/2 cup of fresh sweet strawberries (22 calories) and slices of nectarine (67 calories) along with a cup of coffee for a total of 189 calories? Neither is wrong or right when you’re on the DIY Diet. You make all the decisions.
Keeping a daily food diary forces you to think about the meals you plan to eat in any one day so you can stay in control of the calories you deduct from your calorie checkbook. If you plan to splurge on an evening restaurant meal then you will want to make adjustments in the other meals you eat during the day to avoid overdrawing your account for the day.
If you do overdraw your account, however, you get a new deposit of 1600 calories the next day from which you can draw. Don’t ever think that because you’ve overdrawn your calorie account on one day that your account will be closed or that your diet program is over. That’s not the case. With the DIY Diet you forget the past and move on to the new day’s challenge.
I keep track of other things in my daily food diary, too. When I’m figuring out the calorie count per serving for something I plan to cook, I write the recipe down in the diary so that I won’t have to do the calculations again. If I try a new recipe or a new frozen meal, I write my comments in the diary. If I think of an easier way to do some task in the kitchen, I again write it in my diary. I also keep a record of my weight loss in one section of the diary.
The daily food diary is a record of where I’ve been and keeps me on track as I move toward the future. There’s no special way to keep the diary. I put the date on top of the page, then make two columns, one for the food item or ingredient and the other column for the calorie count. Download a free sample food diary page here.
A 5" x 8" spiral notebook will also work. If you have a full-time job away from the home, you’ll need to devise another method to keep track of the calories you eat during the day unless you don’t mind taking your notebook with you.
When I was still working full-time and was on a different diet, I used to fold a sheet of typing paper in half once and then in half again so that the piece was one quarter of its original size. It fit easily into my pocket or purse and it wasn’t obvious to others when I took it out to make a note. I could be jotting a note about anything. A pocket size spiral notebook could serve the same purpose. You may want to transfer the information to your regular daily food diary at the end of each day.
Of course, the minor challenge of keeping a food diary is finding out how many calories are in the foods you’re eating. You can easily find out how many calories are in food by reading nutrition labels, calculating the calories in your home cooked foods, and looking up nutrition data for the restaurant foods you eat.
If you’d prefer an online version of a food diary, I can recommend MyFoodDiary.com. It will cost you $9 per month, but for that money you get access to an online food diary, an exercise log, the ability to make reports and graphs of your weight-loss progress, and a database of nutrition data and calorie counts for over 45,000 different foods, including restaurant items and prepackaged foods.
MyFoodDiary.com comes with a recommendation from the Wall Street Journal and Blueprint Magazine (which is a Martha Stewart Omnimedia magazine). I created an account at MyFoodDiary.com, thought it had some nice features, but I cancelled after a day because I prefer to keep an offline food diary in a notebook. It’s more portable, and I don’t need an internet connection to access it.
TheDailyPlate.com is another good online food diary site, but TheDailyPlate.com is free and supported by Google advertising. It has a large database of calorie counts, helps you keep track of calories and goals, and even has a mobile version of the site so you can check calorie counts on the go with your web-enabled phone, PDA, or iPhone. This is very convenient if you’re in a restaurant and don’t know the calorie counts.
My niece searched for Timber Lodge Steakhouse on her Palm Treo and she found calorie counts for almost the entire menu. To access this service, go to www.thedailyplate.com/mobile in your mobile phone’s web browser.
It’s up to you, though, how you prefer to keep track of calories. The important thing is you keep track of them.
