One of the number one diet tips of all times is to keep a food journal and record everything that you eat. I’ve always failed at this for a variety of reasons: got bored, got lazy, forgot to write it down, didn’t want to have to always look up the calories, etc., etc, etc. Looking back, I see that in actuality the number one reason I failed is that it was too discouraging to continually write down that I’d eaten all the right things and still not lost weight.
Since I’ve changed my focus to controlling the numbers that I can control and not worrying so much about the number on the scale, I’ve been better about actually recording everything I eat. I found an awesome site online called FatSecret that lets me track my calories online, from my Blackberry, or from my new G1. The beauty of it is that I only have to enter the food and Fat Secret tallies up the calories for me. Much better than writing it all down in a little notebook and then having to get out a fat book of calories to tally everything up.The ability to enter my foods on the go and know all the time how much of my caloric balance I have left is tremendous and it goes a long way toward keeping me honest. Not every food I eat is in there, but there is always something that is close. For instance, the Nicole’s English Toffee cookies that I’m addicted to aren’t listed, but there are English Toffee cookies listed and I can manipulate the serving size to reach the calories that I know are in the cookies I eat. You can also enter your own foods, but when I’m doing it from my phone, it’s just as easy to go for close enough. Close enough isn’t perfection, but getting close enough is way better than not entering the foods in at at all or waiting until I have time to sit down and get to perfection. If I waited for perfection, I probably wouldn’t get the foods logged at all.
There are days when I am seriously tempted to “forget” to log something that I ate because I know it will push me over my caloric limit for the day, but then I remember that this log is really all about me and that it isn’t being kept for some calorie counter in the sky. The only person that I will hurt by cheating on my diet log is me and I’m tired of hurting me through overeating, stress, and all the other ways I (like most modern women) abuse myself. If there is only one person in the world that I’m honest with, it should be me so I’ll suck it up and feel the self love as I record absolutely everything that I eat.
Cairn by Cairn 