Monitor to Know What Works and What Doesn’t

Self-monitoring provides a way for you to evaluate which techniques and strategies are working and how changes in eating and exercise behaviors are contributing to weight loss and weight control. Additional techniques involving self-behaviors that can be combined with basic weight loss strategies include only eating at meal time, doing nothing else when eating meals or snacks, leaving the table after eating, and avoiding the grocery store when you’re hungry.

Scientific methods for improving the long-term benefits of your weight loss plan include developing self-monitoring skills, committing to lifestyle interventions, self-assessing daily results, and self-regulating the necessary changes to weight loss strategies. Positive reductions and improvements in food intake have been linked to increased awareness through nutritional education and an increased awareness of how the body utilizes food for energy, including the storage of fat.

Reasons Why You Need Timely Feedback

Evaluative judgement and feedback occur at least partially through the phasic activity of the midbrain in signaling the process for reward-based learning of new lifestyle habits. Listed below are four benefits of tracking your food, weight and daily exercise:

1) Documents Cause and Effect – One of the most important types of self-monitoring strategies in establishing a weight control program is keeping a food log and exercise journal that documents the cause and effect of lifestyle interventions.

2) Helps You Sustain Motivation – Although self-monitoring is merely the act of observing, measuring, and recording your behavior, one of the primary benefits is that self-regulation helps you sustain motivation for reaching and maintaining your weight loss goals.

3) Establishes Achievable Goals – Technology is changing and improving self-monitoring techniques to help defeat some of the major barriers to establishing achievable weight loss goals for daily compliance to lifestyle interventions on a daily basis.

4) Real Time Measurement of Progress – Writing down your weights in a log or on a calendar can help you track real time measurements of your success as well as help you get back on track more quickly after you veered off course when implementing lifestyle interventions.

Time for You to Stop Gaining and Start Losing

Self-monitoring changes that will help you manage your weight will contribute to good health now and as you age. To stop gaining weight and start living healthy, it is important to monitor you weight, food intake and daily exercise. Researchers believe that study participants who are more diligent in self-monitoring and recording results of dietary and exercise interventions lost the most weight. Moreover, a systematic review indicated using digital tools produced even better results. If your bathroom scale seems to be stuck at the same weight, it could be that you haven’t developed the self-monitoring techniques needed to record and track the feedback from the lifestyle interventions you put in place.

At Metabolic Research Center, you learn how to use self-monitoring skills to select the best options for daily dietary intake and physical activities that will result in long-term weight reduction and control for living a healthier lifestyle.