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Katherine's Diet Tip #3: Write it and Lose It!

Socrates told us that the road to wisdom is to know yourself. This is never more true than with your eating habits. Today is Katherine's Diet Tip #3 for your spring awakening and pound shedding. Follow me in The Georgetown Dish every Monday with proven strategies to lose weight, improve your health or just increase your knowledge about nutrition. Through spring, we'll be losing weight together, so you'll be ready for the warmer days to come!

The food diary is the main tool for self-examination of your eating habits. It is important that you begin observing objectively what you eat and the way you eat, for this is the cornerstone of your weight loss success: your own observations.

Keeping a food record plays three important roles:

First, if it is kept at the time of eating or within 15 minutes, it can change your behavior as the behavior occurs - and without your even realizing it or trying to change. After a stressful day at the office, Scott came home to eat dinner alone (everyone had turned in for the night) and then started watching TV on his living room couch. As soon as the TV went on, he reached for his children's snacks in the kitchen pantry, and began munching to relax. This evening routine was happening so automatically that he didn't realize just how much he was eating - when he was not even hungry - until he started writing it down.

The second function of the food diary is simply learning. At the end of each day, week or month, you can look back and analyze for yourself what style of eating worked for you.

The third function of the food diary is to help you individualize your weight loss program. This is critical to your long term success because nothing can last unless it is enjoyable and works into your lifestyle.

If keeping the diary enhances your attentiveness and helps you eat less here or there or even think twice about bringing food to your couch, you could easily save 300 calories per day (which computes to about 30 pounds in one year). And that, folks, can be the difference between losing or not losing.

Excerpted from "Diet Simple: 195 Mental Tricks, Substitutions, Habits & Inspirations," by Katherine Tallmadge (LifeLine Press)