Okay, don’t let the word “journal” scare you.  You can call it a food log if that helps.  SparkPeople calls it a “Nutrition Tracker”, but no matter how you slice it up, the key to effective weight loss is keeping an account of everything that goes into your body. 

An article I read on Yahoo today, discusses a recent study done by researchers in the U.S. that included 1,685 middle-aged men and women.  The study found that over a span of 6 months, those who kept a food journal almost everyday lost about twice as much weight as those who did not.  Can we say, wow?  Those aren’t small numbers.  That’s a huge difference.  And I think I know why.

I can say that for myself, keeping a food journal has made all the difference in the world with my weight loss.  When I originally lost my first 30 pounds in 2007, I kept a food journal.  Then my diet went on hiatus for 6 months during our move to NC.  Once I finally jumped back into diet and exercise, I figured I already had the “knowledge” of what foods I could and could not eat.  I had already kept a food journal for 6 months and I was not going to do it again.  I was being lazy because I didn’t want to deal with it and I thought I already knew what I was doing. 

Eventually I realized that because the pounds were not coming off after months of hard work, it was time to start counting calories and keeping track of my food again.  What did I discover when I started counting the calories of the breakfast that I had been eating every morning?  That it was a 600-700 calorie breakfast!!  And wa-la!  That was the reason I wasn’t losing weight.  I was eating 1/2 my daily calorie intake at breakfast, then a low-cal lunch and dinner, but breakfast had already shot my calories so high that it didn’t matter! 

If you are interested, the breakfast I’d been having was frosted mini wheats (approximately 2.5 servings), non-fat milk, and about 200 calories worth of coffee creamer.  Insanity.  You can read about my cereal obsession here to understand why I might have deluded myself into thinking this was logical.  It sounds healthy, doesn’t it?

So now my breakfast consists of ONE serving of Kashi GoLean Crunch Honey Almond cereal, ONE serving of non-fat milk, and 100 calories of coffee creamer (still working on this one) for a grand total of 386 calories at breakfast.  The Kashi cereal is the best thing since sliced bread.  I love the fact that I get 9 grams of protein, 8 grams of fiber, 500 mg of Omega 3’s, and 15 grams of who grains in one serving of cereal!!  Now my breakfast packs a punch!So, here is the moral of my story.  Once I started tracking my food, I started losing weight again.  Just last month during the Domestic Weight Wars, I finally dropped into a size 12 pair of jeans!!  And although I’ve got a good 20 pounds to go until I reach my goal, I am confident that if I keep hanging in there, tracking my food, exercising regularly, and striving to understand myself better and keep improving, I have already succeeded.