Dieters: do you write down everything you eat?

i actually dont but i am pretty careful with what i eat. i try to eat only a bit of bread during the day and although i am careful, i am not obssesive. i still eat chocolate and am loosing weight albeit slowly. i have gone down a dress size since christmas.

I don't believe in diets. When I was in high school I was over weight and self conscious and I did all sorts of diets. Just the word diet creates a complex that makes it difficult to keep your weight off if you ever lose it. When I was 21, I moved to Paris, France from California and I had decided that I was not going to diet, but I was going to make good food choices and I would only eat until I was full. Good food choices are fairly simple in Paris, but eating until you are full is frowned upon because the French eat all that is on their plate and they don't have doggy bags. I have lost more than 45 pounds in one year and have kept it off now for 2 years. The change in environment helped... even now when I enter my folk's place in Cali, I walk straight to the kitchen, hungry or not. But also the decision to not diet (or to not look in magazines when all the girls are anorexic and not healthy or normal) is what really helped. Don't focus on weight loss, focus on health and feeling good. It's much more productive and sustainable.

I have never just wrote down what I ate to try and make me aware of what I am eating wrong but I have kept a calorie diet diary and found that it really has helped me and my weight loss. What I do is work on a 1500 calorie diet plan and for everything that I intake I write down the serving size and the amount of calories that I have taken in and then once I reach the 1500 I am done for that day. It was hard at first to keep track and learn how to spread out the food that way I can eat throughout the whole day but after about a week I was able to get it down pretty good.

Well i do think every time that i am not going to eat this today or i am going to stay away from meat for this week etc.......but then when it comes to application of all this it just remains on my mind and paper.......how i wish i could stay committed to what i don't want to eat.........but i get tempted very soon, specially if it is concerning food, i cant resist an awesome flavored food.......I think your idea is worth a try.......and i will see how it works....... Have a nice day !!!!

I have done this before; really recently actually. I think it does help a little bit, but it sucks at the same time! It made me super aware of all of the crap I eat. I really didn't think I "cheated" (ate bad bad food) that much until I logged it, and then looked at the log with someone else. I totally believed that all I ate was fish, chicken, vegetables, protein bars, etc. with only an occasional sweet. Turns out I eat ice cream like 4 times a week and drink bathtubs full of fountain soda! So, it did help me to admit where my weaknesses are and get started working on them. After that, though, it just got really annoying. Whenever i feel like I need a reality check, though, I'll start a food log again though; for motivation's sake. Have you recently started dieting? Do you have an exercise plan? I think doing one without the other is close to a waste of time. I started exercising and eating healthy (i don't like to call it dieting because it sounds depressing!) about a year ago and I LOVE IT! I really feel so much better about myself, and isn't that what it's all about?!