Food Tracking Apps

A couple of days ago, Global News did a piece about apps that track your eating. Dr. Arya Sharma, a professor of medicine at the University of Alberta who specializes in obesity, was interviewed for this piece and talked about how tracking food intake can be very helpful for weight loss, because of the principal of self-monitoring. He also cited a recent study from the Journal of Obesity, which found that people who logged their food more frequently lost more weight.

The entire article can be found here. In my own practice, my clients and I use photo-journaling for tracking food. Not only can it be helpful for identifying habits and behaviors, but it also provides an overall view of your day: did it contain enough vegetables and fruit; was it mostly consisting of unprocessed foods, etc.; does my diet need to be more diversified? It’s a LOT less cumbersome than physically entering in data into a calorie-counting app, which as dietician Andrea D’Ambrosio points out in the same article, can be wildly inaccurate.

If you’re curious about the app that I use in my practice and would like more information on my program, please email me at hello@stacyyates.com

From the article:

Just writing down what you eat, and knowing that you have to record it, can be a powerful reminder to make healthy choices, he said. Say you passed a plate of cookies in the office. “That simple act of saying, ‘OK, but now I need to record and I need to remember it,’ might actually make you think twice,” he said.

“It becomes mindful. And that changes everything.”