It’s easy to see why students are drawn to free, online diet trackers, Bokram said, but the programs are more trouble than they’re worth.

“I rarely use food records or journaling with students because it becomes an obsessive thing and stops students from intuitively eating,” she said. “If you start someone on a path of counting calories, depending on who it is, they can become obsessed and can’t get the calculator out of their heads.”

Food labels exist to help people get a variety of nutrients in their diet and avoid eating an ingredient they shouldn’t consume for whatever reason — not to restrict their intake, which is the reason why many students who count calories pay attention to labels to begin with, Bokram said.

Nutritional science freshman Danielle Naida said for her, self monitoring is the best way to maintain a healthy diet.

“Last year, I wrote down what I was eating a little bit, but it’s hard now with busy schedules and stuff,” Naida said. “I would bring my lunch to school a lot so the calories and nutritional facts were right on the labels, but here when you go to the caf with different portions and stuff you can’t pay attention as easy.”

Naida’s immediate future might not include a food diary, but she said if she ever decides to lose a little weight she would definitely go back to logging her food intake.

Unlike Naida, Nikki Zielinski said her experience with food journaling has been nothing but negative, both online and off.

Zielinski, a kinesiology senior, said she used an online diet tracker for a short period of time two years ago to satisfy a requirement of her healthy lifestyles class.

After completing the assignment, Zielinski said she realized the margin of error these programs possess.

“I don’t really find that stuff that accurate because you have to take into account how much walking you do around campus and when you go to the gym how many calories you burn there,” she said.

“I learned from my kinesiology classes that even if the treadmill says you’re burning 100 calories, every person weighs a different amount. Your height and your weight and everything is proportional, so it’s really hard to base stuff off that,” Zielinski said.

One diet-tracking program that doesn’t require the Internet is Weight Watchers, which Zielinski began voluntarily.

In addition to finding it difficult to calculate the number of points in every homemade meal she consumed, Zielinski found the program tedious and time consuming.

“At first, I could see short-term weight loss results but eventually I ended up gaining the weight back,” she said. “You have to know the serving size of everything. The whole thing was a huge hassle.”

Bokram said Zielinski’s experience with the POINTS system is atypical, as the program works best for middle-aged men and women.

“In my experience with Weight Watchers with many students, it hasn’t been a good program,” she said. “They look at the number of points they’re eating. They call it a lifestyle and tweak it but it’s really about numbers. Several students have developed eating disorders from being on the POINTS system.”

But monitoring one’s dietary intake, with either an online tracker or a written journal, has proven to be the most successful way to lose pounds or maintain a healthy weight, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association in 2002. The study also notes that online calorie counters are helpful tools for dietitians to use with clients.

Although Bokram said she encourages people to find alternative methods for weight loss, she said she knows her negative outlook on food journals is not the predominant view of such weight loss tools in society today.

“People think these things are a good thing to do but they only deal with the science of nutrition,” Bokram said. “They’re not dealing with the psychology of nutrition. You need to think about how these programs make people feel.”