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New research shows that tracking your diet, keeping track of what you eat, is the best predictor of a successful diet. Equally important; it takes less time than you might think.
Tracking your diet
Tracking your diet, counting calories, measuring macros. It’s the least sexy but most successful way to lose weight.
A book called ‘Bikini Proof with Sonja Bakker’ will sell faster than ‘Counting Calories with Kenneth’. This applies to many popular diets that are mainly based on trends, shape, and/or the popularity of the provider.
But no matter how slick you make a diet, and whatever famous name you put on the cover of a book, it doesn’t change the reality: To achieve results with a diet, it’s a matter of getting the right amount of energy in the right form. In this regard, measurement is key.
As long as you can’t tell how much energy/calories you need, how much you’re getting, and in what form, then your whole diet is just a matter of guesswork. You may then prepare yourself for disappointing results.
Tracking works!
That keeping track of what you eat is still the best predictor of a successful diet was again demonstrated this month when the results of a new study were published in the journal
Obesity [1].
Researchers from the University of Vermont followed the tracked food intake of 142 study participants for 24 weeks. The participants met weekly in online group sessions led by a trained dietitian.
The participants recorded their daily food intake online. The people who tracked their food three times a day and did this most consistently achieved the greatest results with the diet.
Tracking doesn’t have to take much time
As mentioned, however, many people dislike (the idea of) tracking food and counting calories. ‘It’s boring and time-consuming,’ are common arguments.
But how much time? That’s what the American researchers wondered. Therefore, the time spent logging food was immediately recorded along with it. The researchers were quite excited about the results. The most successful participants in the study, those who lost about 10 percent of their weight, were ‘only’ spending 14.6 minutes per day on logging food by the end of the study. Initially, this was a little over 23 minutes. Through repetition and automatic completion, this quickly decreased.
People hate it; they think it’s onerous and awful, but the question we had was: How much time does dietary self-monitoring really take?……The answer is, not very much.
Jean Harvey, University of Vermont
We can’t make it any more fun….
When we read “14.6 minutes,” our reaction is, however, “So long!?”
In a quarter of an hour, you could also have played three rounds of Fortnite, contemplated the Big Bang, or learned a new chapter of a Swahili course. The last time a quarter of an hour was seen as short, Sonny and Rico were still driving a Ferrari through Miami and men were wearing spandex in the gym.
Tracking your diet will never be fun. Even with our best effort, we won’t be able to make it more enjoyable. But easier and faster!
In the Fitsociety app, we try to make tracking your diet easier and faster. Think of tools like using a barcode scanner, commonly used foods and recipes, and in the future, photographing foods to calculate their nutritional value.
Consistency is more important than detail
Another goal of our Fitsociety app is for users to use it consistently. For example, we also want to send automatic messages when someone doesn’t log in for a day or doesn’t enter any food. After all, you can build the perfect tool, but it only delivers results when it’s consistently used.
That steering towards consistent use of added value is also confirmed in the research. The more consistent and frequent the participants tracked their food, the better the results. This proved to be more important than how long and detailed the tracking was done.
Those who self-monitored three or more times per day, and were consistent day after day, were the most successful. It seems to be the act of self-monitoring itself that makes the difference — not the time spent or the details included.
Setting the right expectations
To prevent disappointment, it’s important to set the right expectations. The researchers therefore point out that customers should also know in advance how long they should roughly spend logging food.
In addition to trying to shorten the time for logging, we will also communicate interim to coaches and clients what the average time spent tracking in our app is.
