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Sign in17 October 2009
Keeping a food and exercise diary
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Is keeping a food and exercise diary the key to losing extra weight?
If you are serious about starting a weight loss programme, it is fair to say that a food diary and exercise diary is an invaluable resource.
To lose weight you have to achieve a net calorie balance that is below your maintenance level - essentially, you need to burn (expend) more calories than you consume. If you achieve a calorie balance of 500 calories per day less than your maintenance level, that will cause you to lose 1lb of body fat per week!
Writing down everything you eat and drink (calories consumed) along with activities undertaken (calories expended) is an important catalyst towards losing weight - this is because the first step towards change is awareness.
That's why our online food diary and exercise diary is a surprisingly powerful weight loss tool. Once you become more aware of your eating and exercise habits, you'll be able to focus your attention on particular problem areas.
This view is supported by a whole host of studies in the public domain......
Recent Study: July 2008, USA
For instance, a July 2008 study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that dieters who completed a daily food diary lost twice as much weight as those who didn't.
The researchers concluded that the simple act of writing down what you eat encourages you to consume fewer calories.
"Those who kept food records six days a week, jotting down everything they ate and drank on those days, lost about twice as much weight as those who only maintained food records on one day a week or less"
The study was based on 1,685 overweight or obese U.S. adults aged 25 and older. For six months, the participants kept food diaries and were encouraged to eat healthily and be physically active. After six months, participants had lost almost 13 pounds, on average. The most powerful predictor of their weight loss was how many days per week they kept their food diary
How Purple Weight Loss can help you......
Purple Weight Loss provides its members with a whole host of free to use weight management resources. Key to weight management (and weight loss in particular) is understanding your eating and exercise habits so that you can make the right changes to your lifestyle.
Keeping a food and exercise diary is the ideal way to do this - your daily net calorie balance can be charted against your target calorie balance to keep you on track towards achieving your goal weight.
The Purple Weight Loss online food and exercise diary is completely confidential and easy to use. Your diary is automatically cross-referenced with your personal targets, so you can keep tabs on how well you're doing with your weight loss programme on a day to day basis......and, best of all, it is free!
In addition to our diaries, our free to use resources include, amongst others:
- Calculators to help you to work out your personal daily calorie requirement for weight maintenance which can then be used to set a suitable calorie target that will start you on the road to weight loss; and
- An activity database that can help you to calculate how many calories you burn for over 600 different activities from washing you car through to doing the ironing, to doing a run!
Why not register today?