Use a Food Diary NOT just a Calorie Counter for Effective Weight Loss

To be successful in losing weight healthily, you need to be more than just a Calorie Counter.

Calories measure the food energy content of what you eat and drink in an entirely non-qualitative way.

If you just rely on counting calories as part of a weight loss diet then you are missing an important element of proper weight loss nutrition and are potentially setting yourself up for failure.

Some diet plans and weight loss programs even steer you away from any form of measurement of your food intake and whilst these can work okay if you stick to the plan to the letter, this leaves things pretty much in the realm of guesswork and approximation.

Some form of exact measurement is a more certain way to monitor your weight loss nutrition and counting calories goes some way towards this but it gives you far less than the whole picture that you need for successful and sustainable weight loss.

Measuring overall calorie intake on a daily basis does give you a handle on the total food energy that you are consuming. This is important because we are all subject to the basic physical laws of energy equivalence which means that if we consume more food energy than we expend in physical activity and in maintaining our metabolism then each calorie of that excess food energy will most likely end up as stored body fat. (We should anyway of course always be more properly talking "fat loss" rather than "weight loss" and for a discussion highlighting the very real difference here see: http://hubpages.com/hub/WeightLossPounds )

However, as already stated, this is not the whole story-because all calories are not created equal! If this was the case your body would react in exactly the same way (in terms of its tendency to increase or decrease stored body fat) to an equivalent intake of calories whether these calories were taken in the form of burger and fries or lean meat and salad! Common sense tells us that this can't be true and good nutritional science confirms this-in spades!

The answer to this has to do with how our body deals with the different dietary components which determine the "quality" of our diet in terms of the various nutrients we consume and these are broken down into the three principle macronutrient groups of Proteins, Carbohydrates and Fats.

So by measuring the amounts of the various macronutrients we consume each day we can measure the quality of the food energy we consume whilst counting the calories we ingest measures the quantity.

A great deal of conflicting information about this abounds everywhere in the diet and weight loss space and many people get extremely confused. What is best for optimum weight loss? Is it a "low fat" diet? Is it a "low carb" diet? Is it a "low everything" diet?

Well the answer is that it needs to be a structured diet that suits both you, your lifestyle and your own weight loss objectives and ideally needs to be something that can be monitored and adjusted on a real time basis such that you can "fine tune" your nutrition to produce the results that you want whilst not compromising your way of life unduly.

Now the detail of how you establish what the ideal proportions of macronutrients in your diet should be is a matter outside the scope of this article, but is something that I cover comprehensively in my book "Weight Loss Made Simple". However a good starting point is to establish a "macronutrient ratio" of 50/30/20. This means that the calories contributed to your diet should come 50% from Carbohydrates, 30% from Proteins and 20% from Fats.

However, to be able to "analyse" your food intake at this level, to ensure optimum nutrition, means that you have to have a way of easily tracking and recording this data. This is where the DAILY FOOD DIARY SPREADSHEET becomes an invaluable tool which, with the aid of a set of good dietary food scales (see some examples of these that are available from Amazon & Ebay below), some food nutrition tables and the information displayed on food packaging means that you can accurately record all the data that you need to simply and easily measure both the quality and quantity of your daily food intake.

Now, at this point, many people will say-"All this measuring and monitoring hassle-is it really worth it?" And my answer to this is that ...if you are really serious about losing weight (fat) and keeping it off long term...it is not only worth it, it is absolutely crucial!

It is simply amazing how, unless we have a disciplined way of monitoring our food intake, we can fool ourselves into thinking that we are eating sensibly and within the limits of our daily "allowances". There is simply no substitute for measuring and recording what we eat in a formal and disciplined way.

This does not mean that we have to go to rediculous lengths to achieve this and there will be times when we have to guess and approximate a bit but the current trend in food packaging and labelling to record in detail all the nutritional information, makes this task so much easier.

Why is it so important to know the ratios of the macronutrients that we eat then? Well the full answer to this is to be found in books such as "Weight Loss Made Simple" or Tom Venuto's excellent work "Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle" (see links section below for this) but one key factor has to do with what is called the "Thermic Effect". This means that certain types of food, especially Proteins, require your digestive system to actually expend calories in order to digest that food item. Therefore if your diet contains more protein some of the calories present will actually be lost in the digestive process whilst more or less the opposite is true of fats.

By using a spreadsheet based "daily food diary" all you have to do is enter the quantities of each different food item you eat each day into the diary and the spreadsheet automatically calculates the amount of calories and the macronutrient composition from the other basic nutritional data that is input into the spreadsheet. It also calculates the cumulative totals for the day and computes the macronutrient ratio of your diet on a daily basis.

The video on this page takes you through an example food diary spreadsheet and shows you how easy this is to use. You can either make your own food diary using a spreadsheet program such as Excel or used a template that has already been prepared such as the one bundled with "Weight Loss Made Simple".

So, I heartily recommend you NOT to be just a "calorie counter" but to make use of a "daily food diary" spreadsheet and take total control of both the quality as well as the quantity of your food intake and optimise your weight loss nutrition to scientifically accelerate your fat loss and more quickly achieve your weight loss goals.