Guest Blog Post - from Journey To Fitness

Today I thought I'd have a guest blogger stop by. Today's guest blogger is Lou (who happens to be my big brother). Lou runs things over at Journey To Fitness and is an Independent Beachbody Coach (Beachbody are the fine folks who bring you such things as Shakeology and the wildly popular P90X workout system). Here's Lou's take on what I call "flogging" - or, in other words, keeping a food journal.




Apocolypse of Food (write it down!)
Fear may be the mindkiller, but food is the workout killer.

What do i mean by that? Well someone can workout all the time, but if they eat Twinkies like they are going out of style then they should not expect much weight loss.

I use one of those fancy city boy iPhone apps to track my calories. And that's all well and good when i use it. Thing is, that its easy to get sidetracked. You have to make an effort to write down your food everyday. During the week its easy to do because i have a decent structure with work and after work family activities. Its even easy to stay away from the sweets at work. See, I work in an office and there are always candy, and cookies and cake and some kind of other boatloads of crap temping people to eat poorly. But what happens during the weekend?

Well you see the weekend is more loosely scheduled and I forget to write my food intake into my fancy app. So what good does the app do if you only write down food during the week when you are good and not during the weekend when you are eating garbage?? So its an effort of discipline. I'm just trying to make it a habit of inputting the data once I'm done eating. even if that means I'm away from home.

My calorie goal is around 2000 calories a day. and I figure that's a good amount to get since I'm doing beach body's Insanity (gratuitous plug: you can get Insanity and any other beach body product from me, your humble beach body coach) which burns about 1000 calories a workout.

But hey, wait a minute, why write your food intake down anyway?

From Health News via ediets:
“The more food records people kept, the more weight they lost,” said Kaiser Permanente lead author Jack Hollis Ph.D. “Those who kept daily food records lost twice as much weight as those who kept no records. It seems that the simple act of writing down what you eat encourages people to consume fewer calories.”

The average weight loss over 6 months was roughly 13 pounds, with more than two-thirds of the nearly 1,700 participants losing at least 9 pounds. Those who participated were asked to follow the heart-healthy DASH diet, which is rich in fruits and vegetables, attend weekly support group sessions and exercise for at least 30 minutes a day, as well as tracking what they ate. Participants who used their daily food journals doubled their results." (from: http://healthnews.ediets.com/diet-weight-loss/double-your-weight-loss-write-idea.html)

That's impressive! All the more reason to write food intake down. Get started today with a fancy app for your phone or other device, do it on your computer, or go old school with a pad of paper!