Self-Monitoring Helps to Prevent Weight Regain

---

Recent studies have shown that your readiness and personal motivation to self-monitor and self-regulate your weight management strategies are key components for a successful weight-loss journey. Regular weighing, recording of daily food intake, and adding physical activities during the initial phase of losing weight, during the maintenance phase of weight control, and during periods of increased food exposure also help to prevent weight regain.

Routine self-monitoring helps you identify when weight gain occurs, so you can reinforce the lifestyle practices that can bring your weight back into control. Monitoring, assessing, and regulating changes are crucial components for healthy living. Since a temporary loss of weight control is common, the key is learning how to recognize high risk situations that can lead to overeating and a return to a more sedentary lifestyle.

How to Regulate Your Weight Loss Journey

In the past, self-monitoring was incorrectly thought of as a punishment and often overlooked as a critical component for success when making lifestyle changes for dietary intake and physical activity. Listed below are four benefits of tracking your food, weight and daily exercise:

1) Learn More About Your Body – Self-monitoring is a strategy for healthy living that uses self-assessment of eating and exercise behaviors so you can learn more about your body to make better food choices and ensure you are losing body fat not muscle mass.

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 – 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 (BMI).

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-Monitoring Should Also Be Your New Habit

Studies suggest that self-awareness is a critical component in self-regulation of one’s lifestyle interventions and other weight control strategies. The goal of self-monitoring your weight loss strategies serves as an early warning system, which is especially important when problems arise. Tracking lifestyle interventions can keep you on target for achieving your goals. In short, you must pay deliberate attention to your own actions for making better food and exercise choices. 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 should become a habit into itself.

At Metabolic Research Center, we’ve been personalizing lifestyle interventions and healthy living strategies for more than three decades. Visit MRC online to learn more about self-monitoring your way to a healthier life with better weight control