A daily journal

The key and one of the most important steps in the Eat Smart System is keeping a daily journal.  Research shows that people that keep a basic journal (just writing down what you eat) lose more weight than those that don't!  

If you're using pen and paper, buy a regular spiral notebook, or go for a pre-organized book like the My Healthy Helper 30-day journal.  A good smartphone app and websites are myfitnesspal.com and sparkpeople.com.  Write down the time you ate, what you ate, and how much you ate. Make a habit of jotting notes right after you eat.  Include every single bite, lick, and taste (anything larger than a crumb counts). And don't forget to keep track of your sips. Even the most diligent diarists often forget to include the glass of white wine they had at dinner and their 3 p.m. handful of M&Ms.  Your journal can also consist of much more than a simple food diary. It can contain detailed information about your exercise efforts, your feelings and behaviors -- whatever will raise self-awareness and keep your enthusiasm, determination and optimism at a consistently high level.

Researchers from Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research followed more than 2,000 dieters who were encouraged to record meals and snacks.  They found that the single best predictor of whether a participant would drop weight was whether the person kept a food diary. It trumped exercise habits, age, and body mass index. The number of pounds people lost was directly related to the number of days they wrote in their log.

It's easy to overlook bites, licks, and tastes. But that's a huge mistake — there are 25 calories, on average, in each mouthful. Translation: Six little bites a day add up to around 15 extra pounds a year.


Adopting the practice of journaling will not only help you to succeed in your efforts to lose weight, but you also can use journaling to assist you in reaching other desired goals and aspirations, in order to have a more successful and fulfilling life experience.