Want To Lose Weight? Keep A Food Diary

Not true.

"US researchers working on a study comparing approaches to weight loss, found that keeping a food diary can double weight loss as part of a managed programme; they said that the more food records they kept, the more weight the participants lost...

The trial, known as the Weight Loss Maintenance (WLM) trial, was a a randomized trial conducted at four centers to compare different approaches to maintaining weight loss over a period of 30 months. The August paper describes the results from Phase I, the first 6 months of the trial...

1,685 overweight or obese (Body Mass Index or BMI in range 25 to 45 kg/m2) participants aged 25 and over and who were taking blood pressure and/or antidyslipidemia medication (eg cholesterol busters) took part in 20 weekly group sessions to encourage them to restrict their calorie intake, take part in daily moderate to intense physical exercise for half an hour a day, and modify their diet according to the DASH (dietary approaches to stop hypertension) guidelines."
It was journaling AND "weekly group sessions to encourage them to restrict their calorie intake, take part in daily moderate to intense physical exercise for half an hour a day, and modify their diet."

Clearly, not for the individual wanting to do it on his or her own.

Clearly, a food diary alone was not used.

And how well did these people do in the face of all this intense supervision (and the diary?)

"The average weight loss among all the participants was about 13 pounds (5.9 kilos)"

Or barely over 2 pounds per month.

And how much other effort, in addition to the diary and 20 weekly meetings, did this take?

"The average reported amount of time spent in moderate to intense physical exercise was 117 minutes a week (nearly 2 hours)"

Six months comprises 26 weeks. This is 52 hours of "exercise."

How much weight did most people lose?

"'[J]ust nine pounds, like the majority of people in this study did...'"

So for nine pounds, it took 52 hours of exercise, 20 weekly sessions, six months of time, 1 food diary and a partridge in a pear tree.

And this was a success.

Pathetic.