Food Journals

Ok, so I touched on this a while ago, but I'm loving my "I Lose" application. Of course, I guess these things won't work for everyone, but having a phone like the iPhone, or any PDA for that matter, allows you to easily keep track of meals throughout the day and is an extremely helpful tool to dieting/fitness/weight loss.

I'm not going to go through citing the various blogs and research articles that helped bring me to this conclusion, so forgive me, but the first step to any type of diet is to track what you eat. It's not enough that you can recite the meals and snacks you had over the course of any given day, you need to know the calorie and nutritional content of those meals.

With any basic calorie-counting tool you will most likely have access to a Fat, Carbohydrate (total and Fiber), and Protein calculation as well. Use it! By tracking your nutrient intake, you can more easily see where you are overeating. For me, it was in the form of Carbs. I was eating somewhere in the neighborhood of 3500 calories a day. Come to find out, I was hitting my numbers in Protein (I try to hit around 200g/day), was about where I needed to be in Fats (anything around 65-75g/day), but I was way over in Carbs (sometimes up to 400g/day!). It was a little obscene, and, after evaluating whether I needed those two pieces of cornbread from Safeway, I decided there were some things that I could stand leaving out.

I guess it's not enough just to track calories, you have to have a goal in mind. For me, I wasn't so concerned with the weight loss aspects, I just wanted to fix my diet a bit. Instead of doing it by the percentages (a lot of people prefer 40% Carbs, 30% Fat, and 30% Protein) I decided to cut my Carb intake below my Protein intake. So far I've been good about only getting Carbs from my veggies, some whole wheat bread, and pre-workout supps. It's kept me under 150 g/day and I've been replacing the lost calories with Fat and Protein. It's basically my way of agreeing with the "new science" that tells us that fat is not really bad for you in the right forms (meat, nuts, and dairy mainly).

I'll keep up with this for a while, and get back to you with results. In the meantime, here are some calorie-tracking sites I found:

http://www.thedailyplate.com/
http://www.my-calorie-counter.com/
http://www.fitday.com/

They are listed in the order they came up in the search engine. It seems like The Daily Plate could be pretty good.