Food Tracking: How Much Is Enough?
You don't need to track your diet every day to lose weight.
Monitoring one’s food intake is an important part of a diet program geared toward weight loss, but many find it tedious and hard to stick to daily. Good news for on and off-trackers: a recent study in Obesity finds that compulsive food tracking is not needed to achieve meaningful weight loss. A team of researchers from the University of Connecticut, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Florida tracked 153 weight loss program participants for six months, wherein users self-reported their food intake using a commercial digital weight loss program.
Employing a method called receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve analysis, the investigators determined how many days people needed to track their food intake to reach clinically significant weight loss. It turns out that participants only needed to track around 30% of the days to lose more than 3% weight, and 40% of the days to lose more than 5% weight, or nearly 70% of days to lose more than 10% weight. So, when working with clients who are trying to drop some bodyweight it’s still a good idea to encourage them to keep tabs on what they are eating, and to do so for as many days as possible. But you can put them at ease by telling them they need not be militant about food tracking to see results.
See also: A Handy Way to Count Calories
Matthew Kadey, MS, RD
Matthew Kadey, MS, RD, is a James Beard Award–winning food journalist, dietitian and author of the cookbook Rocket Fuel: Power-Packed Food for Sport + Adventure (VeloPress 2016). He has written for dozens of magazines, including Runner’s World, Men’s Health, Shape, Men’s Fitness and Muscle and Fitness.
