Journal your bites

Want to know the single best way to lose weight? Journal your bites.

From www.webmd.com/diet/features/single-best-way-lose-weight:
"When researchers from Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research followed more than 2,000 dieters who were encouraged to record meals and snacks, they found that the single best predictor of whether a participant would drop weight was whether the person kept a food diary. It trumped exercise habits, age, and body mass index. The number of pounds people lost was directly related to the number of days they wrote in their log. (It's no coincidence that Weight Watchers, one of the most successful diet programs, asks participants to track what they eat.)"

It seems that we all tend to guess low on how much food we stuff into our mouths. I find these stats to be interesting and too-true of myself...
"Americans typically underestimate their daily intake by about 25 percent, reports nutritionist Carrie Latt Wiatt, author of Portion Savvy. The situation gets even more complicated when you eat out. In a 2006 study led by Cornell University, 105 diners in fast-food restaurants were asked how many calories were in their orders. For the small items, almost everyone guessed correctly; for the larger orders, the diners underestimated the calories by a whopping 38 percent... Even the professionals didn't predict accurately. Researchers at Louisiana State University asked dietitians to estimate their daily caloric intake — and they lowballed the number by 10 percent."

So we might consider an end to guessing, and a start to calculating, at least once in awhile. I just checked out nutritiondata.com, which lists the stats for many foods and has some other nifty tools.

Happy food journaling...