Weight Loss Strategies: Make the Unknown Known
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When it comes to weight loss, believe in research.
Weight loss is hard work, and you need to do what you know for sure will actually work.
What strategies are proven successful for weight loss and you can move forward with certainty that these will get you to your goal weight?
I’m a member of the National Weight Control Registry. The NWCR is a huge database of people who have lost at least thirty pounds and kept it off for a year or more. Many of us who are in the registry have lost much more weight and kept it up for a longer period of time. I’ve lost 100 pounds and kept it off for over 10 years now. Every year the NWCR sends us a survey that we take either online or in the mail, and then they use this research to figure out how people who are successful in maintaining their weight do all kinds of different things in order to achieve their success.
If I told you there was something that you knew for sure would help you with losing or maintaining weight loss, would you do it? This strategy for sure helps people reach success. Research from as far back as the 1970s has proven this true.
This strategy is keeping a food journal.
Now you might be thinking, great, keeping a food log, that’s so boring! I hear you, but this is guaranteed to work!
Keeping a food log can be an app on your phone (check out this post where I go into specific ones), can be jotting it down on the calendar, or it can be just keeping it in a regular spiral-bound notebook. (Check out this post for my top 5 favorite weight loss printable planners.) You can even use a Fitness tracker like a Fit Bit and use the food program that comes with it. (This blog post tells about my experiences with fitness trackers.)
Writing down what you eat is guaranteed to help you be more successful at losing weight and what’s amazing about this is you do not even have to show it to anyone! Just the fact of writing it down or keeping track of it makes you more successful weight loss. Why is this?
Writing it down takes what was unknown and makes it known.
I know this is true in my own life. The truth is that when you overeat, you tend to flip that denial button. You don’t really want to know how much you are eating or how many calories you are eating. I know that I go into this veg out mode when I’m overeating and especially when I was binge eating.
When you write it down, you take what was unknown and make it known. This makes keeping a food log a great success strategy for weight loss.
Have you kept a food log as a weight loss strategy?
