With the new "camera diet", participants snap everything they eat with their cellphones, or any camera to hand.
But don't be fooled - the "camera diet" is not as effortless as it sounds. In fact, it is the labour of taking pictures of everything they eat that makes people more conscious of their eating habits.
Participants in one camera-diet study reported that the extra effort of recording the snack or second helping of food made them think about whether they should really eat it. So they were prompted to eat less and make better choices - or so they said.
"[The camera] curbed my choices. It didn't alter them completely, but who wants to take a photo of a jumbo bag of M&Ms and write it down?", one volunteer in the study commented.
Another said: "Sometimes I felt tempted to have a snack, but I decided against it because I was too lazy to record it."
The pilot study, Think Before You Eat, by Lydia Zepeda and David Deal from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, "revealed that photographic food diaries can alter attitudes and behaviours associated with food choices".
Volunteers identified three "negative behaviours" when looking at a week of photo diaries: eating excessively, imprudent snacking on biscuits, sweets and junk food and failing to eat a nutritionally balanced diet.
The concept of camera diets and using websites, or blogs, to track one's health and lose weight is gaining popularity.
A group of 19-year-old teenagers who are being tracked from birth to age 20 - with about 3000 parti-cipants this is South Africa's longest-running child and adolescent health study - are using their cellphone cameras to evaluate their eating patterns.
A US-based dietician, Cristin Dillon-Jones, who posts pictures of everything she eats or drinks on her Eat Like Me blog on Self.com, receives many hits. She said that snapping her consum-ption influenced both her portion sizes and nutritional choices.
"Since I have to take the photograph I have to plate [dish up] the food and this forces me to cho0se a portion size before I start to eat," Dillon-Jones said. "It also makes me think before I take seconds ... if I am hungry, I will always take more, but sometimes the pause to think about it (and get the camera) is a good way to realise whether you actually need that second helping."
Dillon-Jones, who walks every day and runs a few times a week, added: "My blog has not changed the way I eat, but it does help me to have more variety in my diet, particularly with fruits and vegetables. I feel the blog is a welcome reminder and motivation that there is a way I should eat each day for good health - sometimes you just need that little push to do it day-in and day-out."
Now a scientific trial in India is designing software that can better analyse digital pictures of meals. Explaining their project, Professor Carol Boushey from Purdue University's department of foods and nutrition, stated: "Using cameras to evaluate your diet by snapping pictures of your meals is not new.
"What makes our proposal different is that we're designing software to better evaluate portion sizes and nutritional content."
Photographic food diaries are, of course, not an original idea. Instead they expand on the practice of written food diaries, which are routinely used in dietary-intake studies and weight-loss programmes.
But taking photos is as accurate and has a concrete advantage over written diaries. Pictures must be taken before the food is eaten - unlike written diaries, often recorded when it is too late to change one's mind.
Zepeda and Deal found their volunteers were more likely to change their eating behaviour with photo rather than written diaries "because they serve as an intervention at the point where decisions ... are being made".
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