You’ve been hearing it a lot lately in the news that people who record what they eat on a daily basis are more successful on their quest to lose weight. The part that gets me is the news stories never go into detail on the subject. They don’t explain how to keep a food journal (but they do tell you where you can get an online one), or how to use it to your advantage. A lot of people might think of a food journal as a little book that you record what you had for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The problem with that is if you actually want to track the quantities such as grams to calories you’ll have to do the calculations by hand (or a calculator). Now there are online services that do all these calculations for you.

The service that I use is Fitday. They have both a paid, and a free service. You input the foods you eat during the day (they have a huge database, and you can create a new foods and input the data manually), and the journal will tell you how many grams of protein, carbs, and fat you ate during the day and also total calories. They also have many tools such as a weight loss goal tool where you say what weight you want to be and it will tell you how long you have, and will be updated everyday.

The part where you have to really pay attention is you have to know what kind of foods to eat, and how much per meal/day. You should be really focusing on how much you need to eat per meal. Your body does not operate on days – it operates on a per meal basis. If you eat too much one meal some of that will go to fat. Having an understanding of proper nutrition is an important key to the equation too.

The point here is to not only keep a journal, but start getting educated about proper nutrition. Without the knowledge of nutrition first you will become lost within the journal.

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