How often do you keep track of your calorie intake? If you are like me, trying to casually lose weight, sweating it out in the gym or watching what you eat I bet you are not keeping a daily tab on how many calories and what type of food you are eating daily.

I know I wasn’t – at least not regularly. Sure, one day I would pay particularly close attention to what I was eating, if I was lucky, I would count the calories, but that was far from a daily routine. In fact, some days I would deliberatlely avoid counting calories because I intuitively knew I was WAY over.

Then I came across this article on keeping a weight loss diary and wham, it hit me when they said that research has shown those who regularly keep a food diary tended to lose twice the weight over those that do not – and they kept it off longer.

Now, it does make sense since our ability to lose weight and overall weight loss goals have so much to do with our mental outlook – and if you are comitted to keeping a daily calorie count and food diary then you have made a stronger comittment to yourself to keep your weight loss goals.

I started this last week and let me tell you – I was blown away by some of my calorie counts. Certain days I was way over my count before 2PM in the afternoon while other days I was not eating enough — in other words, I was on a rollercoaster diet.

Niether case is optimal, especially when you are training and working out as part of your weight loss routine, you need calories to feed the muscle building efforts from the resistance training.

Try it for a week, you will find some surprises and you will find that by keeping a closer eye on your calorie intake you will keep your weight loss objectives more in mind and tend to be more conscious at every meal.