Losing a small amount of weight can help to make the two-thirds of Americans who are overweight healthier. According to Kaiser Permanente research by Victor Stevens, Ph.D., published on e! Science News, losing just 5 lbs. lowered the risk of getting high blood pressure by 20 percent. Keeping a diet and exercise journal can help make this weight loss a reality.
Function
The idea of keeping a diet and exercise journal is to help you learn where you can make improvements in your eating and exercise habits, and to help keep you accountable for your eating habits. Writing down what and how much you eat can help you to keep from overeating.
Another reason to keep a diet journal is to find out which foods might be causing allergy symptoms. Noting exactly what you eat can help you to see patterns that would point to particular foods causing the symptoms.
Features
Diet and exercise journals can be a simple matter of scribbling down the relevant information on paper or entering into an online journal. It is important to put down not only what you ate, but also how much you ate and to be as detailed as possible about the food and the circumstances when you ate the food. You can purchase a journal made especially for this purpose, which will prompt you to put in the relevant data, or you can use a notebook.
Benefits
Those who use diet and exercise journals lose more weight than those who do not, according to a 2008 Kaiser Permanente study, reported by e! Science News. This might be due to the increased accountability involved, or to the way that these journals make it easy to see eating patterns that are making it hard for you to lose weight.
Free online diet and exercise journals help you calculate both the number of calories and the nutritional value of the food you eat, so you can determine whether you are eating healthily as you try to lose weight. It also helps you figure out whether you are eating the right number of calories for weight loss.
Considerations
Write down all the circumstances involved when you eat something, including how you are feeling, who you are with, the time of day and how hungry you are at the time. Some people tend to be emotional eaters, or to eat too much late at night or when they are in social situations. Keeping track of the circumstances can help to determine whether or not this is true for you, notes "Arthritis Today."
Expert Insight
The UCLA Health System recommends that you keep your diet and exercise journal for at least two days, and that you include everything you eat, including beverages and condiments. Write down the serving sizes and how the food was prepared. Be as descriptive as possible. Use this information to assess your diet and get a better idea of what you can do to lose more weight.
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