Food Journal

Many of the better, and most successful, weight loss programs either come with a food journal or recommend that you keep one. If you take out a few minutes each day to write down what you eat, when you eat it, how you’re feeling, and other information you may like to include, you can have significantly more success with your weight loss efforts than people who don’t keep a food journal.

Why to have a Food Journal

It’s not necessary to keep a food journal for the rest of your life. After a couple of months, you should have an idea of which foods keep you feeling better and more energized, and which foods cause you problems. You should also have fine-tuned which amounts satisfied you and when you ate too much and how it made you feel.

Here is a list of some of the things you may want to track in your food journal. Remember, no one is going to see this journal but you, so be accurate and honest. That is the only way you will benefit from what you record.

1. What you ate and in what quantities
2. Calories, grams of fat, grams of protein, grams of carbohydrates, fiber
3. Were you really hungry or just craving something?
4. What time of day did you eat?
5. What were you doing that may have triggered your desire to eat?
6. How did you feel right after you ate? Satisfied, over-full, still hungry?
7. How did you feel about two hours after you ate?

There are many food journals online that you can download and use if you do not have a diet program that includes one. A spread sheet, like those you can make with Microsoft Excel are also good. You can create as many, or as few, columns as you wish and expand the columns to fit any notes you might like to include.

What You Can Learn From a Food Journal

If you are subject to “emotional” eating, or eating when you aren’t really hungry, it is important to identify why. What was the emotional experience you were going through when you felt you needed to eat? Did you enjoy the food, or just bolt it down? Maybe you were having bad feelings that you wanted to suppress, and food worked to “push” down the feelings.

The important thing here is to tie the emotional eating with a particular situation. Then, when you are not caught up in this emotion, calmly think of a way you can satisfy whatever situation the food was solving for you with a non-food response. You may be amazed at how much you mindlessly eat when you are in the throes of an emotion and not really hungry at all. But you won’t get these connections if you don’t keep track in a food journal.

Keeping a food journal is not hard to do and it will go a long way towards insuring your weight loss success.

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I’ve been thinking about writing this post for awhile now and figured that since the new year is in full swing, I’d humor myself.

In 2010 I exercised, but not a lot. On a good week, I was moving about 3 times a week. Yet, it seemed most weeks I was making an effort only once. But why? Excuses! I’m really good at rationalizing and this year I want to face my excuses head-on. Admittedly, there were many days that my excess sugar consumption kept me from physically being able to exercise- bloat, upset stomach, lethargy, and depression all kicked in and helped make the couch look super comfortable.

Now that I’m having a sugar-free year I hope to avoid some of these excuses, but I know there will be new ones cropping up.

Here are some of my most frequent excuses:

I’m too tired. Here’s what happens: I’ll have every intention to exercise, but I’ll get caught up in doing everything else under the sun. Oh! Looks like I need to clean out the refrigerator! And more often than not I am genuinely busy and wait and wait and wait until I’m just too tired to exercise.

Solution: Schedule exercise for a time of day when I don’t feel too busy or too tired. That sounds easy enough? Probably not for all of us. I don’t have to be at work at a certain time and most of my days are spent at home working, but there are a lot of folks that leave for work at 7am and get home around 5 or even 6, then they have other chores to tend to. What is the solution? Make exercise a priority (I’m speaking for myself here too) wake up 45 minutes early and go to the gym, do an exercise dvd or dance to your favorite playlist. For me, I like to exercise with my husband who is a late sleeper, so I need to schedule exercise at 4 or 5 pm on most weekdays. I need to write it down and stick with it.

I can’t find any workout clothes. Okay, I’m probably alone on this one, but I always feel like every component of my workout gear is in some state of being cleaned, under a pile of clothes, or in the hamper. I need workout pants, t-shirt, shoes, sports bra, socks and ipod (if I’m lucky) to get motivated to exercise. Sometimes I get unmotivated just by knowing it will take 30 minutes to find something.

Solution: Dedicating a drawer to just exercise clothes. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time and know it could help me a lot. Having all of these items together in one spot would be very beneficial to my sanity and my exercise schedule.

I’m too busy. I’ve been guilty of this excuse, mostly because on the days that I am pumped up to exercise, I’m also pumped up to do everything else. And on other days I just have a lot to do, I’m sure I’m not alone.

Solution: Facing facts. In 2010 I managed to watch the entire series of lost, six feet under, and pushing daisies. I also watched three seasons of mad men, several episodes of jeopardy and countless movies on Netflix. I also found time to create 300 pieces of jewelry, cook many delicious meals, read 10 books, put makeup on, get dressed up, work on this blog and so many other things that I simply made time for. To say that I was “too busy to exercise” is simply not true.

Waiting for the perfect situation. There have been points in my life that I needed perfect weather, the perfect workout shoes, the perfect time slot, a perfect feel-good easy day to exercise. Guess what?

Solution: That day does not exist. How we feel now in this moment about exercise is probably how we’ll always feel. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve mapped out my road to weight loss only to fall short waiting for it to feel right. Waiting for life to be stress-free and slow. In my mind, there was going to be a day when the clouds parted, the angels sang and I’d turn into this super healthy person that bound out of bed at the mere mention of exercise. And all I have to say to myself is “honey child, that day will never come. you either do it now or not at all”.

What are some of your exercise excuses?

You must be sick of hearing about fad diets in the quest of how to lose weight quickly, perhaps despairing that you can find one that actually works. A relatively new system developed is fat loss 4 Idiots is based on the so-called transfer of calories method. It was launched online, after they studied the flaws in all the calories hyped transfer many diets. This scheme guarantees weight loss in 11 days which is made by looking at how the digestive system after the meal is consumed. Under this scheme, it does not matter whether you take more carbohydrates or fasting but you eat the right foods at the right time. The fat loss 4 idiots diet works by manipulating the fat burning hormone secretion by enhancing the secretion of hormones from the burning of fat and decrease the secretion of hormones from fat storage, which is a win – winner. Due to the majority of calories are burned more quickly. There is another technique that fat loss 4 Idiots diet uses called calorie shifting that has been scientifically designed to confuse the human body on the amount of calories a person consumes, mostly while using the calorie move the Feeding your body is fooled into thinking you're not a diet, your metabolism will be running high so you lose weight much faster. fat loss 4 idiots requires consumption times a day you will lose weight. The theory behind this is that if you eat the right foods at the right time of day, then you will accelerate your metabolism, which will help you burn calories more easily, the perfect way to spend calories. It has been widely publicized that many A list celebrities are using this technique including Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Lopez by eating regularly throughout the day and not eat anything after 5 hours which also helps to speed metabolism. This also has the advantage of being able to feel satiated and weight maintenance. In my opinion, if you are looking for a calorie shifting diet fat loss 4 Idiots could be your answer in the ongoing battle to lose weight fast and keep it off.

fat loss 4 idiots is one of the most popular and successful schemes today. With tens of thousands of users from countries around the human world, fat loss 4 Idiots has proven successful. But how this system really works?
  fat loss 4 idiots is based on the Shifting Calories method.
  Shifting calories is one way you can keep your metabolism running high and burning a lot of fat in constantly changing what you eat. Of course, you can not do that with any kind of food, but the basic principle is the same: if your metabolism gets used to a routine, it will tend to adapt to this routine and slow. If you eat the right kinds of food at the right time of day and watch them move around, you'll be able to "fool" your metabolism and keep it running high at any time.
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