Change Habits to Lose Unwanted Pounds

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Self-monitoring of your daily dietary intake and exercise routine enables you to develop a sense of accountability that provides the necessary motivation for self-regulation of your weight loss plan. 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.

Busy lifestyles and hectic schedules can contribute to faulty eating habits and environments that are somewhat contrary to being physically active. Self-monitoring and self-assessment can lead to science-based lifestyle interventions. Additional techniques involving self-behaviors that can be combined with basic weight loss strategies include only eating at meal time, leaving the table after eating, and avoiding the grocery store when you’re hungry.

Self-Regulation Supports Mindful Behavior

Behavioral studies suggest self-regulation based on daily tracking can impact your mindfulness of behavior change to boost weight loss and provide for better weight control. Listed below are four benefits of tracking your food, weight and daily exercise:

1) Documents Cause and Effect – Dietary self-monitoring by recording energy intake in a food log is only useful for individual feedback but when combined with weigh-ins and an exercise diary can document the cause and effect of lifestyle interventions.

2) Helps You Sustain Motivation – Self-monitoring is a key to behavioral modifications and there are a multitude of ways to self-monitor your daily food intake and exercise activities to help you stay motivated throughout your weight loss journey.

3) Establishes Achievable Goals – Since establishing achievable goals is essential for effective weight loss, self-monitoring is an important part of losing weight, weight maintenance and healthy lifestyle changes.

4) Real Time Measurement of Progress – Along the same lines as keeping food logs, self-monitoring physical activities allows you to record real time measurements of your progress in a daily exercise diary or workout log.

MRC Can Personalize Actionable Interventions

Self-monitoring changes will help you manage your weight and 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. A recent study conducted by Duke University found that without following a particular diet plan overweight participants who tracked his or her daily food intake using a low-cost smartphone app lost a significant amount of weight.

At Metabolic Research Center, we deliver healthy strategies tailored to your body’s specific needs for dietary intake and exercise. Personalized actionable lifestyle interventions lead to long-term success for living healthy for a lifetime.