According to US researchers, maintaining a food diary with a thorough description of what you eat and drink along with the number of calories it is made up of is a very effective method that can aid people lose weight .  See also Can't Stop Eating.
A research conducted on 1,685 middle-aged men and women for six months. It proved that people who maintained a food diary for more or less everyday could lose almost twice the weight when compared to people who did not maintain the diary.

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The finding of this research supports the previous research that ratified the importance of maintaining food diaries to help people lose weight. Many companies such as Weight Watchers International Inc incorporate food diaries in their weight-loss program .

According to Victor Stevens of Kaiser Permanente's Center for Health Research in Portland it is beneficial for people working on weight loss to write down everything they eat as it is a powerful technique.

Stevens, who was one of the lead for the study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine opines that maintaining a food diary helps participants know from where the additional calories are coming from and help them formulate further detailed plans to deal with those situations. He feels that with this technique dieters can be held accountable for what they eat.

The study was conducted on people from the four U.S. cities of Portland, Oregon; Baltimore, Maryland; Durham, North Carolina; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The average age of people involved in this study was 55.

The average weight loss of the people involved was about 13 pounds (6 kg). However, people maintaining a food diary for almost the whole week were able to lose 18 pounds (8 kg) when compared to 9 pounds (4 kg) weight loss for people not maintaining a food diary on a regular basis.

The participants were told to consume less fat, more vegetables, fruit and whole grains, exercise for 180 minutes a week, participate in group meetings and maintain a detailed food diary.

The study observed that black Americans are more prone to conditions related to obesity such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease than whites. 44 percent of the people in the study were blacks.

Dr. Keith Bachman, a Kaiser Permanente expert mentions that “Keeping a food diary doesn't have to be a formal thing. Just the act of scribbling down what you eat on a Post-It note, sending yourself e-mails tallying each meal or sending yourself a text message will suffice,"

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