The article below gives details of one of the important resources that successful slimmer Graham Kidson used to achieve a 30% reduction in his body weight, which he has succeeded in maintaining for over three years. The accompanying pictures show Graham before and after his weight loss achievement.

One of the best tools to help you lose weight as part of a nutrition oriented weight loss program is making use of a daily food diary.

Whilst some find that this can be something of a chore there is no doubt that, if you are trying to follow any sensible diet plan, some monitoring of your dietary intake is an essential ingredient to successful weight loss.

Most nutrition experts will tell you that, as well as monitoring your food consumption in terms of its energy value (i.e. calories), the best plan is to follow a diet that is nutritionally balanced in terms of its macronutrient constituents, in other words, the quantities of Protein, Carbohydrate and Fat (and to a lesser extent Fibre) that you consume daily. The best diet programs will give you advice on the proportions of these macronutrients that you should be including in your diet to achieve the results that you want based on your lifestyle, food preferences and level of physical activity.

Careful use of a food diary means that you can track all this information to ensure that your diet is nutritional sound and that you are keeping within the correct “calorie zone” which will enable you to lose weight whilst not adversely impacting your metabolism (which if its starts to slow up as a result of too much calorie restriction will just frustrate your weight loss efforts).

One of the biggest advantages of using a daily food diary however is the personal discipline that it imposes as it makes it much harder to “cheat” on your diet. It is amazing how easy it is to fool yourself about exactly how much you are eating unless you record meticulously or to convince yourself that your food choices are always in keeping with the requirements of your diet. Using a food diary makes you confront these matters head on and leaves you no place to hide in terms of “fudging” the issues with regards to the quantity and quality of what you eat.

Inevitably, keeping a regular food diary and recording and analysing your daily food intake can be something of a chore and therefore anything which can make this task less time consuming or tedious is to be welcomed. There are some software solutions that have been developed to help with this, which can often also perform some other quite sophisticated tasks such as helping with menu planning (like Meal Plan 101 ), but a simple spreadsheet is ideal for this purpose as well.

If you are experienced with spreadsheets you can develop your own to suit your personal preferences and needs but there are also free resources available which you can make use of where the spreadsheet has already been “customised” for use as a food diary and where you only have to put in your own data to get the numbers “crunched” by the spreadsheet. You will find that getting hold of a free customised spreadsheet that gives you a ready to use Excel Food Diary can be a really valuable tool to help you succeed in the weight loss war and the feedback that it gives you will handsomely repay the time and effort taken to record the information required.