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Lose Weight After The Holidays With a Nutrition Journal

Well, we’re back from vacation, that´s for sure. The restaurant terraces, the beach, the beach bars, the ice cream, the barbecues, the whirlwind of plans that fill our agendas are over… Despite the effort to eat healthy, these holidays often make a difference in the scale. And to look and feel great for the return to our regular routine, there is no other option but to get to it. I am not a nutritionist or health expert, but I have a lot of experience when trying to lose weight.

You can find many miracle diets, but although some are very effective in the short term, apart from not being at all healthy, in the long run they are not durable. In the end the best thing to do is what we already know: eat a healthy and balanced diet and do some (or a lot of) exercise. It seems very easy, but it is VERY difficult for me.

It is proven that usually we eat more than we realize. And many times we eat quickly and without paying attention to what we are intaking. That makes it much harder for us to lose weight. For that reason I have been using a fitness journal for a long time, which is just a notebook where I write down all the meals and the exercise that I do throughout the day. It is a very good way to be accountable for our actions, and if one day we eat too much, we can always compensate the next day.

It is also important to practice what is called “Mindful eating”, that is, to be aware of what we are eating at the moment we are eating it. Knowing how to differentiate between eating with hunger and eating without hunger will help us identify certain behaviors or patterns that are counterproductive without realizing it. Taking into account the emotional part, we can easily identify what our relationship with food is like.

This simple task of writing down the meals, seems like nonsense, but something very curious happens to me: when I write down what I eat, I start to be more responsible. It’s like I start competing against myself, wanting to do better and better every day. And who better to compete with? This way, I always win! 😉

Álvaro Pedroche, an expert from the blog Consejos Fitness (Fitness Tips) tells us how to get the most out of it:

“A nutritional diary should be a trusted companion for our change of life. If we want to lose weight, or if we want to gain muscle mass, it is crucial to know where we are starting from and where we are going. For this reason, recording everything we eat and our training sessions will allow us to check if we are on the right track.

If we want to lose weight, or if we want to gain muscle mass, it is crucial to know where we are starting from and where we are going. For this reason, recording everything we eat and our training sessions will allow us to check if we are on the right track.

As for the nutrition part, the ideal is to record the food we eat and its calories. At first it can be a bit time-consuming, but if you think about it, our diet is not so varied as to have to write a different thing every day. With that, we will know the total calories that we have ingested at the end of the day (important fact to know if we eat more than we burn). For example, to lose weight, our intake should never be less than 1500 calories or in the end we will have the opposite effect.

On the other hand, when recording our workouts, we will see our improvement in the day to day. I recommend to point out the exercises you do, the series and repetitions, the weights, but for me it is very important that your feelingsafter finishing are written also. That way, when you do those same exercises in the future, you will see that it was not as difficult as the first time. “

To make this task easier for you, I have created some very pretty fitness journals or food diary. They are very complete and cover all the aspects of weight loss that we have mentioned previously: motivation, goals, progress, meal planning, measurements, exercise, daily food and water intake, etc. You can find them here or at My Berry Own Amazon Store.

What do you think? I would love to know what works for you. Tell me about it on social media, and don´t forget to use the hashtag #myberryown or @myberryown so we can read your comments!