Will Using a Food Tracker Help Me Lose Weight?

A food tracker will help you to lose weight. Studies have shown that dieters who document their food intake lose more weight than those who do not. Using a food tracking tool (e.g., fitday.com's food tracking tool) will accelerate your weight loss efforts and allow you to take control of your weight loss plan.

Identifying Eating Patterns

If you are someone who eats when stressed out, a food tracker will help you to stay on top of how many calories you are consuming. You may not realize that you are snacking anytime something stressful happens at home or at work. Documenting what you are eating and in what quantities will help you to identify your eating patterns.

Learning about Nutrition

Additionally, a quality food tracker will indicate not only the number of calories in your food, but also the amount of protein, carbs and fats you are consuming. This is very difficult information to track on your own. Fitday.com's food tracking tool, for example, allows you to track 1000's of foods and their nutrients. When you enter a food into this tool, you will see how many grams of fat, protein and/or carbs it contains, along with its total calories and nutritional make-up.

After you have finished entering your daily food intake, you can examine your diet to see if you are eating well-balanced meals. For example, after entering your food intake into FitDay's food tracking tool, you may find that you are eating too many grams of fat each day. Or, you may notice that you are eating mostly carbs and fats and not enough protein. The food tracker helps you to closely monitor your diet so that you can make adjustments as needed.

Another way that a food tracking tool is helpful is in teaching you about the nutritional make-up of particular foods. For example, some people know that nuts are generally healthy foods, but they do not realize how much fat they contain. When using a food tracker, you may learn new pieces of information about your favorite foods and identify vitamins and nutrients that you may not be consuming in sufficient quantities.

Visual Representation of Your Diet

Some people are very visual and need to see their progress charted out in ways that don't consist of just numbers and words. FitDay's food tracking tool also gives you a graph of where you stand with your nutritional intake. This is especially helpful if you are a visual person and feel encouraged by graphical representations of how quickly or slowly you are moving toward your goal.

Accountability

Food trackers help to keep dieters accountable. When you are not documenting your food, it's easy to forget what you have eaten throughout the day. When you know that you have to log into a food tracker daily, that may motivate you to eat smaller portion sizes or to skip a high-calorie snack.

A food tracking tool is an effective way to stay on top of your weight loss goals. Knowing exactly what you are consuming not only educates you about the nutritional make-up of foods, it motivates you to stay on your diet and meet your weight loss goals.

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