Many of today’s diets restrict the types of foods that you eat. But calorie counting is still alive and well as a way to lose weight or maintain a healthy weight. I prefer this method over any other because I want to have choices about what I eat. Choices encourage a permanent change.
Weight loss aids help the dieter with the day to day struggle. One way to make the task go a little easier is to create an index book that will hold nutrition information on the foods you eat most often.
I cleaned out some desk drawers recently and found an old address book, the kind you get at the Hallmark store. The notebook was gently used. It has 6 rings, and is filled with pages and dividers marked alphabetical. It has an attractive, sturdy cover, too. I almost sent it to Goodwill, because nowadays I keep all my contacts on computer. But it finally occurred to me that I could use this with my calorie counting.
It’s a good idea to keep a book of calorie and nutrition information for regularly consumed foods, or perhaps for recipes, which are a little bit involved to figure sometimes. So I converted this address book into my index book. There were only a few pages that had been written on, so I tossed those out. Several of the dividers were written on also, so I used white labels to cover all the old handwriting. I ended up with a very nice book to put my information in.
I like writing down the calorie, fiber, protein, and calcium content for regularly consumed foods because I don’t want to have to look them up in the pantry every time I want to eat something. I write my information down in large letters, so that I don’t need my glasses to read it. And once I get a recipe figured out, I definately don’t want to have to do that again. So I write the information down right away.
Basically, it’s a time saver. The most important part about making it work for me, has been taking the time to fill it out. If I empty a cereal box or something, then I cut the nutrition information out of the box and lay it on the table, marking what it is for, on the back side, before I toss out the box. When I get 4 or 5 nutrition labels collected, I just sit down with my glasses on, for a few minutes and enter the information into my blue book.
The nice part is, that when I need to know some nutrition information, then I can just pick up my book and look it up. The alphabetical dividers make it easy to find things when I need to. This is just another way to minimize the fuss of calorie counting. It really does save a lot of bother.