Diet Journal, Do You Really Need One?

One of the items you may want consider if you have made the decision to go on a diet is keeping track of whatever measure you are tracking. In the old days before all of these new fangled diets – all one had to do is count calories. A doctor would simply put a patient on a diet and he or she would lose weight! Imagine that back in the 20th century – they did not even know about the glyecmic index and diets would still work after a fashion.

In this post I will explore this dreaded concept of keeping track of what you eat and why that might matter. I will also explore alternate ways to diet and then the big question – why do we lie to ourselves when we diet? Here is a picture of my spreadsheet - how I keep track of my calories when I am sticking to my diet.

One way to keep track of what you eat!

If you decide to keep track of what you are eating, depending on what diet you are on – a spreadsheet like this can be helpful. First off you will notice that I keep track of what I eat, how many calories, and grams of fat. If I was on a low-carb type of diet I might keep track of carbohydrates and calories. If I was on a weight-watchers diet I might like points (like my wife does).

Why keep track at all? Last year the times I made the most progress was when I kept track of every calorie I ate. The other times I kept up with the exercise just fine, and even got stronger but I ended up back-sliding (gaining back some weight). Why? For me it was other pressures – life happened and I could not keep track of what I was eating without a journal of some type. I kept lying to myself and saying I was still losing – but I was either stagnating or gaining mostly.

The cool thing about a spreadsheet instead of a notebook is that I can easily apply formulas to find the fat percentage I am eating or do trends of calories consumed. Whatever I want to track is easy if I record the data. Perhaps I am too geeky… I don’t know but excel is easy for me.

Whatever diet you are on and whatever you are counting – it is harder to lie to yourself if you have to keep track. You will notice if you go off of the wagon right away… not months later lying to yourself – saying you are retaining water weight for some reason!

I still do think you can keep track of what you are doing in your head if everything in life is easy, but whenever the pressure is on, and you are a stress eater like me – you had better have some other way of ensuring you stick with whatever diet you are on.

By the way I am only 6 days into this diet tracking again and I have lost over 7 pounds I think. I’ll jump on the scale on Sunday morning for my ‘offical’ weight but it is fun to see retained water and food stuffs move out of the body at the beginning of a diet. Most weeks I am shooting for 2 pound to 3 pounds lost to keep from starving myself.

As you can see I am eating plenty of fruits and veggies but I am not happy with my calorie and fat intake. I am finding the days I eat bocca burgers – I actually only eat about 1250 calories and 21 grams of fat. That is not enough calories for a man and my fat percentage is too low at 15% for those days. I’m going to have to be careful not to have too many light days or my body will go into starvation mode.

If you go into starvation mode – you metabolisim slows down and you cannot lose weight easily if at all. I like to eat at least 1500 – 1800 caloires and 20% fat as well as exercise at least every other day to keep the fat loss on track.

I hope all is well with your plan and happy Friday the 13th!