Re-establishing Control Is Crucial for Success

Multiple scientific studies that focused on identifying groups of individuals who had been successful at losing weight and implementing good weight management concluded self-monitoring was a key factor. Through self-monitoring and self-regulation any temporary loss of weight control and a return to old behaviors can be quickly identified to prevent a relapse and reduce the damages. Most importantly, reestablishing control quickly is crucial for success.

A comprehensive weight-maintenance strategy requires continued self-monitoring of weight, dietary intake of food, and adherence to routine exercise to balance energy consumption from food with caloric burn from physical activities. Your body weight, stores of body fat, energy metabolism, and fat oxidation are regulated by numerous hormones and other substances in your body. Maintaining hormonal balance as you age can be crucial to healthy living.

How to Apply Self-Monitoring Skills

One major (and possibly the most important) behavioral interventional strategy for weight loss and weight management is the self-monitoring of lifestyle changes. Listed below are four benefits of tracking your food, weight and daily exercise:

1) Learn More About Your Body – Weighing yourself is an important and simple self-monitoring behavior that allows you to learn more about your body. It serves as real time reminder of your eating and exercise habits.

2) Builds Healthy Habits – Self-monitoring is an acquired skill used to keep track of your own actions and performance for activities like eating and exercise behaviors. Self-regulation allows you to build habits for healthy living.

3) Tracks Body Mass Index – Simple self-monitoring skills can allow you to track your body mass index with routine weigh-ins and a calculator. You BMI is you weight in pounds divided by the square of your height in feet. The higher the BMI number, the more body fat you have to lose.

4) Easier to Focus on What Works – Monitoring eating and exercise habits can help you lose body fat while retaining fat-burning muscle mass by making it easier to focus on what works for you. Managing the right efforts is a key to successful weight control.

Learning Self-Regulatory Skills for Healthy Living

Since weight changes can have health implications, self-monitoring your weight loss efforts allows you to make crucial adjustments to changes made to your dietary intake and daily physical activities. The process of changing habits requires well developed self-regulatory skills that include self-monitoring, self-evaluation of progress and the appropriate self-reinforcement for the progress made based on changes in weight. Although comprehensiveness self-monitoring of dietary intake had no impact on weight change during weight management, frequent self-monitoring of lifestyle interventions did produce beneficial effects for long-term healthy living.

Here at Metabolic Research Center, we have been educating clients about the dangers of following diet plans that severely restrict food diversity. Visit the MRC location nearest you to learn more about self-monitoring effective lifestyle interventions.