Advantages of Keeping a Food Diary
Monday July 28, 2008
Last week, I told you about my article on the top GI food irritants. In order to know if you any of those foods are truly a problem for your system, you need to keep a food diary. This is a relatively simple process, as you can see in my newest article, “How To Keep a Food Diary.”
The act of keeping a food diary may do more than just help you to identify “trigger foods”. It may help you to lose weight! A large scale study of a weight loss program found that individuals who kept a food diary lost significantly more weight than those who did not keep the diary. Just writing down what you are eating appears to result in choosing to take in less calories. If you struggle with your weight, a silver lining on the black cloud that is IBS might be some weight loss, that is, if you keep a food diary!
Source:
Hollis, J. et.al. “Weight Loss During the Intensive Intervention Phase of the Weight-Loss Maintenance Trial”American Journal of Preventive Medicine 2008 35:118-126.
Comments
Keeping a food diary is clearly helpful for conditions like IBS, but there are a couple ways that I’ve found a paper food diary lacking. First, it’s often ingredients of foods that you eat that are the problem, and it gets really tedious to write down all the ingredients of the foods you’re eating. Second, after you’ve been keeping your food diary for a while and want to go through and analyze it, it seems like sort of a haphazard approach to leaf through your food diary and see if you can spot patterns by eye.
I thought it’d be great if there was software to do this, but after searching it seemed there was nothing out there, so I decided to create software to do this myself.