Track Your Eating For Better Results

It is a well-known fact about weight loss that ultimately to lose weight you must expend a greater amount of calories than what you consume. So how do you know how many calories you consume in a day? Do you guess? Try to track it all in your head? I decided to journal my eating. It was a good thing I did, because I was trying to keep track of my meals in my head before. However, once I started journaling, it became immediately clear I was doing a poor job of watching my eating. I thought I kept my eating under 2000 calories per day, but instantly I saw that I was eating over 2500 calories, some days it was as high as 3000. The good news is that once I saw exactly what I was eating, I knew exactly what to change, what I could cut out. Furthermore, because my zeal to record everything, the journal held me accountable. I simply could not cheat on that snack because I knew I would have to record it and see my weakness. This went far in maintaining my discipline in eating.
There are several ways you can go about tracking your meals. The first is the pen-and-paper method, not recommended. I used Excel and created my own spreadsheet. I not only tracked my calories; I also use this sheet to track the amount of protein I ate. Eventually I began recording the calories I burned from my workouts, and recorded my weekly weigh in and body measurements, so this sheet was like a recording of my progress. The third and now most common way is to use free online tools. The most common ones are http://www.my-calorie-counter.com/ and http://www.fitday.com/. Both are free to register and use, tracks calories, macronutrients, and workouts. Tracking my eating was one of the ways to lose weight that I use and was an integral part of my weight loss plan, visit my website to learn others.