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Dear Food Diary
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Becoming aware of what you eat will surprise you—and make you thinner
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By Jonny Bowden, Ph.D.
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Diabetes Focus Spring 2009
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 Are you one of those people who’s been told that “diets don’t work” and that “95 percent of people who lose weight gain it all back”? If so, you haven’t been told the whole truth.
A recent study from the Center for Health Research at Kaiser Permanente Northwest attempted to identify what weight-loss strategies work and what behaviors are associated with successful weight loss. At the top of the list was keeping a food diary. In fact, this strategy proved so powerful that those in the study who kept food diaries lost twice as much weight as those who didn’t.
“The act of writing down what you eat makes you conscious of what you’re consuming,” says lead researcher Jack Hollis, Ph.D. “It’s a powerful behavioral self-management tool.”
Other behaviors that correlated with weight-loss success were the number of minutes per week spent exercising (180 appears to be the magic number) and the number of group meetings that participants attended.
Hollis offers the following tips for those wanting to try food journaling:
• Measure your portions. Use tablespoons, measuring cups or a food scale to control quantities.
• Estimate calories. Use a calorie book or look up food on the Internet. “Most people eat the same foods over and over, so estimating calories really is easier than it sounds,” Hollis explains.
• Keep it simple. Even scribbling down what you eat on a scrap of paper makes you more aware of your diet.
• If you miss a day, just keep going. In the study, those who kept the most frequent food records lost the most weight, but even those who kept some records regularly lost more than those who kept none.
“There’s a myth out there that people can’t lose weight and keep it off,” Hollis says. “This study offers hope that they can.”
If you take in enough H2O, you are forgoing sweetened or artificially sweetened drinks and boosting your metabolism
Water may be the world’s greatest weight-loss drink. Why? It’s needed
for most metabolic processes. It helps flush toxins out of the body. It
gives you energy (even 2 percent dehydration can negatively impact
physical and mental performance). And much of what we perceive as
hunger—driving us to overeat—is actually thirst.
For almost a decade experts have been recommending that the ideal
number of ounces of water to drink each day for weight loss can be
estimated by taking your current weight and dividing by two. For
example, if you’re 200 pounds, go for 100 ounces a day. (Alternative
medicine advocate Deepak Chopra recently recommended the same formula.)
But until now there hasn’t been a lot of research to back up this
conviction.
In two separate studies published in the Journal of Clinical
Endocrinology and Metabolism, researchers found that within 10 minutes
of drinking about a pint of water, metabolic rates begin to increase as
much as 24 to 30 percent. Other liquids don’t seem to have the same
effect. For best results, consume your first pint of water in the
morning on an empty stomach. And then keep on drinking all day! You
could actually burn an extra 17,400 calories a year.
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