I’m a big believer in journal keeping. Keeping a journal for any purpose at all is worth the effort it takes. The best teacher is always experience, and those who don’t know the past are doomed to repeat the past.

The fact is that if you need to lose weight, it’s because you have made eating mistakes in the past. There’s simply no doubt about it. If you hadn’t made eating mistakes in the past, you wouldn’t need to lose weight today.

So here is what I recommend that you do: Get a spiral-bound notebook and a pencil or pen. Put it in a place where you will see it often every single day. (I recommend on a kitchen cabinet.) Now, you want to keep a record of what you eat, how much of it you eat, when you eat it, and why you eat it. This information kept over a period of time will show you exactly what kind of eating mistakes you are making, and even why you are making them. Armed with this information, you can change the future — your future.

Far too often we view food as something other than what it really is. Food is fuel. Food is the fuel that’s needed for the body to live and for the organs of the body to function. Food does NOT equal love or comfort — even though society tells us that it does.

I’m not a member of the TOPS (Take Off Pounds Sensibly) organization. But I have a friend who is, and she lost a lot of weight and kept it off for more than five years. I asked her how she had managed to accomplish this elusive feat.

My friend said that keeping a food journal as recommended and the TOPS pledge were totally responsible for her success. I knew the value of journal keeping, but I asked her to explain the TOPS pledge part to me.

She said that before she ate anything, ever, she repeated the TOPS pledge to herself: “I am an intelligent person. I will control my emotions and not let my emotions control me. Every time I am tempted to use food to satisfy my frustrated desires, build up my injured ego or dull my senses, I will remember: Even though I overeat in private, my excess poundage is there for all the world to see.” She said that keeping her food journal showed her how she had used food to do all of the above.