- Food trackingkeeping tabs on what you eat and whenis a proven way to lose weight USATF to Elect New President Amid Budget Deficit, Food trackingkeeping tabs on what you eat and whenis a proven way to lose weight.
- A new study BYU Sweeps NCAA XC Team Titles Obesity finds that food tracking takes less than 15 minutes a day once you get the hang of it.
- You don’t need to go overboard on detail, either: Meticulously describing your intake didn’t yield better results—but more frequent check-ins did.
Food tracking—keeping tabs on what you eat and when—is a proven way to lose weight. One study of nearly 1,700 participants back in 2008 found that keeping a food diary can double your weight loss when you’re trying to shed some unwanted pounds.
It works, but the problem is, it’s also viewed as a giant, time-consuming pain in the rear. So some folks don’t bother even trying.
But the reality is that, once you get the hang of it, it doesn’t really take that much time at all—less than 15 minutes a day, according to a new study BYU Sweeps NCAA XC Team Titles Obesity by researchers at the University of Vermont and the University of South Carolina.
“People hate it; they think it’s onerous and awful, but the question we had was: How much time does dietary self-monitoring really take?” said lead study author Jean Harvey, Ph.D., R.D., chair of the Nutrition and Food Sciences Department at the University of Vermont in a press release.
To answer that question, Harvey and her team evaluated the dietary monitoring habits of 142 men and women in an online behavioral weight control intervention. The volunteers met once a week for an online group session led by a dietician and then logged their daily food intake online for 24 weeks.
When the researchers crunched the data, including how much time each participant spent logging their food and how often they logged in, they found that the most successful volunteers—those who dropped 10 percent of their body weight—spent an average of 23.2 minutes per day tracking their food during the first month. By the end of the study, after six months of tracking, they had gotten it down to just 14.6 minutes a day.
[Stravas 2024 Yearly Report Is Here but many shy away from it because it seems too time-consuming!]
The best news though, is that you don’t have to maniacally monitor every morsel you put in your mouth, or whip out a food scale: You just need to jot down what you’re eating when you eat it. The participants in the study who spent more time filling in a bunch of details did not get better results. Those who checked in frequently did.
“Those who self-monitored three or more time per day, and were consistent day after day, were the most successful,” Harvey said in the release. “It seems to be the act of self-monitoring itself that makes the difference–not the time spent or the details included.”
So if you’ve been stuck trying to make the scale go in the direction you’d like, consider tracking your food intake using one of the many online dietary-monitoring apps like My Fitness Pal. “It’s highly effective, and it’s not as hard as people think,” Harvey said in the release.
