Stay accountable when trying to lose weight by keeping track of your diet through a paper food journal, an online calorie-tracking website or a weight-loss mobile app. Tracking your diet forces you to accept personal accountability, according to a 2008 article from ABC News, "Keeping Food Diary Forces Weight Loss," and makes you pay closer attention to how much food you eat every day. This can lead to better food choices and weight loss.
Paper Journal
For some people, it's easier to pick up a pen and piece of paper to write down what they eat each day. Purchase a notebook dedicated to tracking your food. To use the journal's maximum potential, write down everything you eat in a given day, along with a few other factors: What were you doing while you were eating, such as driving or watching TV? How did you feel while you were eating---were your bored, sad or happy? It is hard to see it on paper, but no one else will see the journal, so be honest.
If you find it difficult to write in your food journal every day, aim for tracking on three weekdays and one weekend day.
Online Tracking
Take advantage of your time in front of the computer by tracking your diet on one of the multiple tracking websites available. Examples of these websites include Spark People and The Daily Plate.
Spark People offers both nutrition and fitness trackers, where you can log both your daily meals and your workouts. The nutrition tracker has an extensive database of food, both fresh and packaged, so it is easy to put together a meal without having to determine a food's calories yourself.
The Daily Plate also offers a calorie counter, an online food journal and a fitness tracker. Other online diet-tracking tools include FitDay and myfooddiary.com, which are both recommended by physician and nutrition specialist Melina Jampolis on CNN Health.
Mobile Apps
Use your iPod Touch or iPhone to lose weight on the go. In terms of convenience, diet-tracking apps take the cake because you can look up food and track calories as you consume them. Apps such as Lose It!, iWatchr and iBody have been recommended by Women's Day.
Lose It! offers a database of foods that you log, plus you can tally and save calorie information for recipes you make frequently. This application is free. iWatchr lets people on a Weight Watchers plan calculate points for the food they eat, plus it includes a food journal and point slider. The application costs 99 cents. Finally, iBody recently won a "Mobie" Award for Best App in the Health Care and Fitness category, and offers more than just a food tracker---it also lets you record blood pressure, pulse rate and BMI. This app costs $9.99. All apps are available from the iTunes store.
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