Keeping a Weight Loss Journal

If you’re trying to lose weight, one of the best things you can do for yourself is start a weight loss journal. It’s an eye-opening experience: You’ll become intimately familiar with your eating habits, and you’ll learn exactly how many calories you’re consuming each day. Because it makes you to pay attention to what you’re eating, you’ll automatically cut back on mindless snacking.

You don’t need anything fancy to start a food journal. A simple spiral-bound notebook will do. However, you may find it easier to buy a journal designed especially for this purpose. A ready-made food or diet journal will have a list of things for you to fill out (what you ate, when, whether you exercised, etc.), so the information is neatly organized for future reference. You’ll also be less likely to forget to write down something important. Alternatively, you could record these details on the computer using Excel spreadsheets or with dieting software. How you do it doesn’t really matter. What’s important is finding the medium that’s comfortable and works for you. As long as you use it consistently, you’re doing fine.

After you eat something, write it down immediately. Make note of the portion or serving size so that you can look up the calorie information in a nutrition book or an online database. It’s also a good idea to note the time of day, how you were feeling, what you were doing, and who you were with. Over time you’ll start seeing a pattern: Maybe you eat more when you’re bored or when you hang around certain people. Once you know what your triggers are, you can plan ahead and make better eating choices.

Don’t cheat. Be sure to write down everything you consume, even if it’s just a couple of mints or a handful of raisins. The best way to stay on track and avoid “food amnesia” is to write it down what you ate immediately after the fact, even if it’s just on a napkin. You can always record it in your actual journal later. If you don’t write it down immediately, you’ll almost certainly forget to later, and you won’t get an accurate picture of your diet.

If you start a food diary and stick with it, you’ll be even more focused on your goal of losing weight. You’ll be armed with the knowledge you need to make better eating choices, and you’ll be able to avoid situations that lead to temptation.

Increasing Your Metabolism

Ever wonder why some people can eat whatever they want and not gain weight, while others gain weight just thinking about desserts? OK, maybe I’m taking a little poetic license with that statement, but I think you get the jest of it. Two people the same age, weight, and height, but yet one has to constantly watch what they eat, and they other just eats whatever they chose.

The reason being is most likely the one person has a higher metabolism than the other, that is their body burns calories at a quicker rate.

What determines one’s metabolism, and how can I increase it? Well for starters your baseline metabolism is established at birth. Some people are born with a naturally higher than normal metabolism, while others are born with a slower than normal metabolism.

Now if you happen to be one of those people that fall in to the later category, not to worry, for there are things you can do to increase your metabolism. These methods will also work for the majority of us born with a normal metabolism. And no, it’s not eating hot peppers, or spicy foods. As some of you may have been lead to believe.

The rate at which your metabolism burns calories is not affected so much by the types of food you consume, but by the amount of food you eat. If a person goes on a diet and reduces their daily calorie intake below their BMR (BMR is the number of calories your body requires to maintain it’s basic functions, like breathing, heart, circulation, lungs, etc.) then your metabolism will decrease within a couple of days. What happens here is our body starts to conserve energy and goes into a “survival mode” so to speak, thus slowing the rate at which calories are burned.

This is why trying to lose more than two pounds a week is not a good idea and usually will not be successful in the long run. For depriving your body of the nutrients and calories it needs to sustain it’s BMR will only end up slowing your metabolism within a couple of days and make it harder to lose more weight. And for you rapid weight loss die-hards out there, drastic reduction in daily calorie intake of less than 800 calories can create some very serious issues and should definitely be avoided.

If you find yourself gaining weight and haven’t changed your eating habits and/or portion sizes, you may be missing an important component that is guaranteed to raise your metabolism, exercise. As we get older most of us become less active and thus our metabolism slows and we start gaining weight. Exercising several times a week will raise your metabolism to preventing this weight gain, while improving and maintaining your over all health.

Depending on the intensity of your workout your body could continue to burn calories at a quicker rate for up to several hours …until eventually returning to it’s resting metabolism rate (RMR). RMR is the rate of your body’s metabolism works to burn calories when you are inactive.

RMR is directly related to the ratio of your body’s total amount of fat to muscle mass. For the more total fat-free mass you have the higher your metabolism rate will be, thus resulting in the burning of more calories when your body is at rest.

Building muscle will raise your RMR, for one pound of muscle can increase burning an extra 15 calories a day. While high cardiac workouts, like aerobics can increase your metabolism from 20 to 30 percent, providing the largest increase in the rate your body burns calories.

So now you know to increase your metabolism you just need to eat balanced nutritious meals and exercise several times a week. I know, I know it’s easier said then done!

Health note: how your thyroid functions directly affects your metabolism and if you have thyroid disease you should see your doctor.