Why Keep a Food Diary?

It’s been proven in many studies that you eat less when you write down what you eat. A recent

study by the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center showed that women on average underreported

their calories by 500 per day. Men were better, and heavier people were the worst

guessers. For whatever reason, if you write down what you’ve eaten or what you’re about to eat,

you’ll eat less. Part of the reason for this is because once you see how many calories something

contains, you’ll automatically eat less. It’s also because you don’t want to disappoint yourself by

eating too much.

Also, you learn by analyzing. A food diary shows you what you eat and when you eat it. That’s

informative in itself. If you know that you tend to have a mid-afternoon snack each day, perhaps

you can change from M&Ms to some peanuts or fruit. If you know that you’re eating

3,000 calories per day when you thought you were eating 2,000, you’ll make the changes necessary

to get those calories down.

However, the difference between a handwritten food diary and an electronic one is like the

difference between a paper check register and Quicken. It’s one thing to balance your checkbook

each month; it’s quite another to analyze your spending and get reports that show you

where the money went and when. Think of an electronic food diary as a very powerful version

of Quicken for your health and fitness.

The most powerful part of an electronic food diary is its nutritional analysis and reporting capabilities.

As long as the food that you’re eating is in its database, a good food diary program will

tell you how many calories you ate, what percentage came from fat, what vitamins you got, and

so on. And like Quicken, a good reporting capability will show you, graphically, how you’re

doing over time.

Also, although we call these products food diaries, they also help you track your fitness levels as

you enter in the exercise you do each day. Some of the programs give you extra credit for this,

allowing you to eat more calories if you exercise more.

FitDay, a software- and Web-based food diary product discussed later in this chapter, offers

seven reasons for keeping a food diary:

• You are more likely to lose weight if you keep a food diary.
• If you keep a food diary, you are more likely to make healthy choices and eliminate unhealthy ones.
• You no longer have to guess whether you’re on track for the day; you’ll know it.
• You’ll improve your nutrition because you’ll eat healthier foods.
• Keeping a food diary helps you stay motivated. It also keeps you focused.
• By recording what you eat, you eliminate unconscious eating. You’ll know what you ate at all times.
• A food diary helps you overcome the barriers to weight loss by identifying the things that are making it more difficult for you to lose weight.

Electronic food diaries come in several forms. You can use a Web site, a software program on

your computer, or a program on your PDA. Some programs are a combination of two or all of

these options. In addition to FitDay, a number of other very good food diary software products

are available. I’ll cover many of them in this chapter; Appendix B, “More Food and Exercise

Diaries,” contains a more extensive product listing.