Weight loss doubled with a journal

I am keen on journals for all kinds of reasons: they improve mental health if you ‘mind dump’ your thoughts every day, expand your creativity and put you in touch with your deeper feelings and processes.

Now it seems it can also help you lose weight – in fact it can double your weight loss. By keeping a simple food diary, you can see clearly what you are eating rather than ‘guessing’. Strangely, guessing results in you thinking you are eating less and exercising more but by using whatever method works best for you – email, pen and paper, a spreadsheet – you get a realistic estimate of how you are really doing.

A US study showed that after 20 weeks of journaling, reducing calories by 500 a day and exercising moderately the participants had an average weight loss of around 13 pounds. But, the more that they wrote in their journals, the more weight they lost and that meant about twice as much as a control group who didn’t write a journal.