My team receives several emails a week with this statement in it.  The way the emails typically end is with the writer asking for help or advice as to what else can be done.

On rare occasions I get a letter from someone who actually admits that he or she tries to watch their food intake but they really struggle with it.

This is one of the key elements that diet pill producers and surgeons try to capitalize on…the inability of people to be honest with themselves about what they are actually eating, and how much they are actually exercising.

Keeping a food diary is only helpful if what you are writing on it is accurate.  That means you have to be honest about how many servings of something you are actually consuming in reality. This includes drinks as well.

A good example of this is a client and friend of mine who was battling IBS and her weight at the same time.  I thought this to be a bit of a contradiction since a lot of times true sufferers of IBS wind up being underweight due to diarrhea and constipation, but I agreed to advise her on how to isolate the problem.

She asserted over and over that her diet was healthy and she exercised every day.  What she didn’t include was her definitions of “exercise” and “healthy diet.”

I had seen a clinical study once where a food therapist (a dietician specializing in food addictions) followed an overweight woman for 3 days, recording everything she observed the woman eating.  The client was told also to record everything she thought she ate.

She was also instructed to record her exercise patterns, and the therapist made notes of her own observations during the 3-day period.

The difference in the two versions of recordings of food and exercise were startling.  The overweight woman maintained she only ate 3 to 4 average-sized meals per day, and always included vegetables and fruit in every meal.  She figured she was only consuming about 2,000 calories a day.

She also recorded about 4 hours of exercise a week for herself.

The therapist, however, actually took some photos of what her client was eating, collected up the food receipts from her eating out excursions (which were at least once per day as opposed to the 2 times a week the client reported she ate out), and re-created a typical food day for the client.

In re-creating the typical food day, she purchased everything she saw her client eat in one day, and laid it all out on the kitchen table.  The table was rather large and every inch of it was filled with food.  Beige food…not the bounty of vegetables the client thought she ate.

The calorie estimate for 1 day was over 4,000 calories because every item was fried or otherwise prepared in the unhealthiest way imaginable.

Her vegetables? They were fried potatoes, battered onion rings, and guacamole. The little bit of salad she ate was drowning in high-fat dressing and shredded cheese.

The fruit she insisted she ate was never in the 3 days’ time in its raw form.  It was baked into fast-food pies, topping on ice cream, or mixed into sugared cereal.

The exercise she reported doing wasn’t done.  The only actual exercise that would count by most therapists’ standards was the 20-minute walk to work she did once that week (it apparently rained the other 2 days.)

So why the difference? Either the client was completely dishonest or she was just way off-base.  It turns out that it was truly the latter. She honestly had no idea that her reality of her diet and the truth were so far apart.

In the study, she was taught to accurately record serving sizes, including HOW an item was prepared and not just what the item was.  For instance…a piece of fish formerly recorded as 1 serving was in actuality 1 order of a fast food meal deal with 3 servings of battered fish.

Her “vegetables” were reworked as well, meaning she wasn’t allowed to count French fries, hashed browns, onion rings, or anything with dressing on it as a vegetable.

Faced with the new rules, her diet completely changed and she was able to start dropping pounds because of the new calorie intake, and new water requirements. She didn’t even have to increase her exercise apart from walking to work at least 4 times per week.

My friend I referred to earlier did this kind of diary for herself and realized she was doing the exact same thing.  Her IBS? It really wasn’t. It was constipation as a result of poor diet.  Once her diet improved, her fiber and water input directly impacted her output and she felt much better immediately.

I bring this up because I suspect many of the emails I receive with reports of “I watch what I eat” are not entirely accurate.  It doesn’t mean those people are lying or living in a dream world, it just means they need to find a better way of ‘seeing’ what they eat.

Food diaries can be a critical tool in the battle to lose weight, but only if used properly.

For more information on a natural method to easily lose weight, see my Weight Loss Breeze program. I will also be releasing an IBS program very soon with a comprehensive food diary included.

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