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Weight Loss Exercise

Keeping a Food Journal for Weight Loss Success

Food Journal

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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General Weight Loss Tips

Motivational Magnet- 10 Minutes

Motivational Magnet- 10 Minutes

How many times have we all given into the temptation, only to feel bad afterwards?

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Keep this motivational magnet at eye level on your refrigerator as your personal reminder.

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Categories
General Weight Loss Tips

What is Interval Training?

I’ve seen interval training get a lot of attention recently because it is supposed to be a quick way to get fit, in this article we look at what it actually is. Interval training is when you use timed intervals to alternate between two different levels of intensity as you exercise. For example, you could warm up, then go on the treadmill for 1 minute of easy jogging at 7km/h, then crank it up to 14km/h for 1 minute, then go back to 7km/h and repeat that for as long as you want to train for.

The reason this is so good is because if you tried to push yourself to do 14km/h on the treadmill for as long as possible in one session then you might only last a few minutes, then you’d stop because you were exhausted. With interval training then the recovery interval you give yourself after each intense interval allows you to push on and do far more of the intense intervals than you could do if you tried to do them all in one go.

Another thing I have found with interval training is that as you are so focused on waiting for the minute to end so you can change the speed up or down, then time goes by much faster. Usually jogging is incredibly boring for me and after 5 minutes I am fed up and just want it to end, but I don’t get that with interval training.

Interval training is probably a more natural way to exercise anyway, consider sports, when you are close to the action then you are doing an intense interval as you try and get the ball etc, then you get to rest as the action moves away from you. Plus we have actually descended from hunters, and that is how they would have exerted themselves too.

The treadmill was just an example though, you can actually use interval training to spice up almost any kind of exercise, you could be on the elliptical trainer, the rowing machine, or even out on a normal bike on the roads. The good news is that studies suggest your metabolism can be elevated for hours after finishing interval training, rather than returning straight back to normal after most other types of exercise, so you are burning fat for a long time even after you finish your workout!

If you prefer changing your diet to lose weight rather than exercising, then check out Cheat Your Way Thin instead.

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