Do you really want to lose weight? Scientists at the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research in Portland, Ore., already have the answer to your prayers.

More exactly, they suggest that keeping a food diary and exercising on daily basis are good ways to start when you decide to lose weight.

The study enrolled 1,685 men and woman aged 25 and older who were overweight or obese and had high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol. About 44 percent of the participants were black people. Black people are believed to have higher risk for conditions linked to obesity including type 2 diabetes and heart disease compared to whites.

All participants were asked to keep daily food diaries, to eat less fat, more vegetables, fruit, and whole grains, attend weekly group meetings and exercise 30 minutes a day mostly by walking.

In the first six months of the study, the participants’ average weight was about 12.5 pounds. However, those who managed to keep food diaries six or seven days a week lost about 18 pounds compared to 9 pounds for those not regularly keeping a food diary.

“Nowadays, there is this notion that people can’t lose weight, and that’s not at all what we found. Keeping food diaries creates awareness of what you’re eating. And quite honestly, most people don’t know where the extra calories are coming from,” Victor Stevens, senior investigator at Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research in Portland, Ore., and an author of the study said, as quoted by the San Francisco Chronicle.

The results of this study should encourage more people suffering from being overweight or obese to keep a diary. This way they would be more aware of the calories in their food and they would know when to stop eating.

The study comes amid worrisome data coming from recent studies, which show more and more Americans are suffering from obesity-related diseases.

A study released last year by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Center for Human Nutrition reveals that if Americans continue with their bad habits concerning nutrition, 41 percent will be obese, while 34 percent will be overweight by 2015.

Particularly at risk are women ages 20 to 34, regardless of race and ethnicity, who seem to be becoming obese and overweight at a significantly faster rate than men and children. The study also found that 80 percent of black women age 40 and above are overweight, while 50 percent are obese.

The same study found that the average American is eating 300 more calories each day than he or she did in 1985. Added sweeteners account for 23 percent of those additional calories; added fats, 24 percent.

If the results of the Kaiser’s study did not convince you, and you had tried all the recipes for losing weight in the world, then you should get a pencil and a piece of paper and write down everything you eat. Add some exercise to this recipe and, after a while, you might be surprised by your own results. Good luck!

The study, supported by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, will appear in the August issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.