Yes, staying under your calorie budget is important for weight loss, but what might be more important is the act of food logging and increased awareness of what, how much, and how often you’re eating.
Almost every weight loss plan under the sun includes food tracking, and for a good reason! Research finds a consistent relationship between more regular tracking and weight loss. As all Lose It! users have experienced, food tracking forces people to pay closer attention to what they’re eating throughout the day.
But here’s something new: by tracking your food in an app, you may have an advantage over those tracking food through other methods. Research has found that people who track their food in an app like Lose It!, rather than with the traditional pen-and-paper approach, naturally eat fewer calories each day and are much more likely to stick with their goals and lose more weight. You’ve already figured out the best way to track your food, now just stick with it!
Why does this make sense?
When your goal is to log every bite of food you have, you’ll become more of an intentional eater. Take this real-life example, from the Lose It! office earlier this week. One of our colleagues brought some cheesecake back to the office after his lunch and left it on the kitchen counter, offering it up to the office. Now we’re far from perfect (when we go out to lunch as a company we always ask for extra rolls), but none of us ate the cheesecake.
Here was the thought process that went through each of our heads: “Ooh, there’s some cheesecake in the office—I’ll just have a small slice. Well, if I do that, I have to track it. That’s kind of a waste of my calories. And I don’t want to know how many calories are in cheesecake—yikes! Hmm, I I’ll pass on the cheesecake this time.”
Since we are constantly thinking about tracking, passing on the cheesecake wasn’t hard. By being conditioned to track every bite you eat, it becomes a LOT easier to turn down otherwise tempting food, and find room in your budget for an appropriate amount of tempting food.
How can you build this habit?
Building up the habit of logging each and every bite is certainly valuable, but how can you get started? Make it an hour-to-hour, day-to-day goal. First aim to track everything you eat in the morning, then aim to track everything you eat in the afternoon and evening. It sounds simple, but breaking the day into smaller portions of time is a great trick to make sure you log all your food. Another option is to plan out your full day of food—and log it all—before you even start your day.
You can even set logging reminders in Lose It! — here’s how to do that in the most recent versions of both the iOS & Android apps:
iOS: Go to Me (More in iPad) > More > Reminders
Android: Menu Button > Profile (“Me” on older models) > Insights > Reminders
Here, you can program a push notification reminder to be set to log one of your meals if it hasn’t yet been logged. Some users like to have reminders programmed throughout the day to stay on track, and others like to just set all meal reminders to come at night to let them know if they missed any meals.
Do you have any tricks to make sure you log every bite?
*Article by http://blog.loseit.com/log-every-bite/
- Posted from the road
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