I have no idea where January’s gone! Having been back at work for nearly a month the Christmas/New Year break seems very distant.
By now, those New Year’s resolutions which many people made on December 31st will have either fallen by the wayside, or be starting to show results/changes in habits. With weight loss or improving one’s health always a popular pledge, I thought it might be a good time to have a look at food diaries, which will help keep those goals on track.
Keeping a food diary is, in my opinion, a vital aspect of weight loss. Because you need to consume less calories than you burn in order to lose body fat, what you eat has a huge impact – it’s definitely a lot easier to NOT eat something in the first place, rather than do the exercise needed to burn it off! By using a tool to keep note of everything you’re eating, you’re able to hold yourself accountable and see where you’re going off track.
Before I had a smart phone, I kept a food diary at My Calorie Counter. This website is great – it has a huge database of foods and their nutritional values, and adds up the calories in each meal for you – much better than just writing down each food in a notebook. The downside was trying to remember what I’d eaten once I got back to my computer! I downloaded the MyFitnessPal app, similar to the My Calorie Counter website, as soon as I got my iPhone:
Using an app is a great way to look up what you’re eating and drinking wherever you are, allowing you to see how much of your daily calorie allowance is left as you go… Trust me, when you realise that there are 95 calories in one tim tam, eating the whole packet (and then having only 50 calories left for dinner) no longer seems like such a good idea!
There are a huge range of food diary apps available, with lots of additional functions to help you get (and stay) healthy. If you’re ready to hold yourself accountable and reach your goals then I highly recommend trying a food diary of any kind.
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