Learn to Anticipate and Identify Problems

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Apart from the obvious need to increase your energy expenditure relative to your daily food intake, no single strategy has proven to be effective for shedding pounds and long-term weight control; but self-monitoring skills are highly recommended. Very low calorie dietary plans that limit daily intake to 800 calories or less were used extensively for weight loss in the seventies and eighties, but those are not appropriate for all individuals.

Learning to anticipate and identify any problems that threaten to undermine the weight loss success you have attained is crucial to self-management and implementation of changes to strategies to resolve problems as they emerge. If you establish and maintain lifestyle changes for a sufficient period of time, the good news is that these healthy new behaviors can become permanent habits. Experts recommend a minimum of six months of diligent self-regulation.

Why Track Food and Exercise Choices?

As a minimum, the self-monitoring of information related to weight loss should be documented in food and exercise logs to track the balance of calories consumed and burned throughout the day. 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 a useful way to keep you on track with better food intake and increased physical activities as you continue to build healthy habits, so you can manage the things that have been holding you back.

3) Tracks Body Mass Index – If you want to lose weight for healthier living, it starts with self-awareness of your eating and exercise behaviors. Self-monitoring your habits can be self-assessed by tracking changes to your body mass index.

4) Easier to Focus on What Works – Self-monitoring along the same lines of food logs, exercise diaries that record physical activities should be recorded to make it easier for you to focus on what is working, so you can make knowledgeable changes to things that haven’t been.

Self-Regulation of Interventions is Crucial

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 as compared to routine weigh-ins. Successful self-regulation of lifestyle interventions that are implemented as weight control strategies depends on the truthfulness, consistency and timeliness of self-monitoring your changes in performance that will help you attain your goals. Since self-monitoring of lifestyle interventions is positively related to successful long-term weight control, the comprehensiveness and consistency of record keeping for food intake and energy expenditure is a habit into itself.

Once you accept that nobody really cares about how much you weigh or how often you exercise, it will be easier to adopt lifestyle interventions that can make a difference. Visit MRC online for the personalized support you need to succeed.