Human Support Can Aid Self-Regulation

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The primary factors that determine the success of self-monitoring weight loss results include truthfulness, consistency, and timeliness. Through a combination of skills, you have the best chance of attaining and maintaining your target weight. Achieving long-term success in weight loss also requires developing skills of self-improvement. To ensure that your food intake is conducive to weight loss, personalizing your menu plan is a great way of moving closer to your goal.

When the frequency of self-monitoring diet or exercise was measured in self-weighing studies, there was significant difference in weight loss results of those who weighed daily compared to the outcomes of those self-weighing less often. Through increased access to healthy recipes and online support, technology can empower you to make better decisions by comparing food intake and exercise results, tracking the progress, adjusting your goals, and staying motivated.

Benefits of Self-Assessment of Your Goals

It is important to reflect on all of your victories as not all of them will happen on your bathroom scales. It is important to attain balance in your daily energy intake and expenditure. Listed below are four benefits of tracking your food, weight and daily exercise:

1) Understand What You Are Eating – By recording your daily food intake, you will better understand your current eating habits, as it is very easy to forget or ignore everything that you put in your mouth during the day.

2) Helps Prevent Overindulgence – If you have to record information about what you eat, how many calories it contains, and what nutritional value it adds to your menu plan, it will help you avoid overindulging.

3) Tracks Your Fitness Progress – Researchers suggest that tracking your physical activities can inspire you to be more active and makes it easier to add to your daily exercise routine, which translates to better weight control.

4) Allows You to Plan Ahead – By self-monitoring the meals that you prepare at home, you will learn how to alter ingredients or adjust portion sizes until it fits your daily intake or exercise routine to meet your goals.

Newer Technologies Save Time for Self-Monitoring Results

Before the advent of newer technologies like smartphone apps and wearable devices people often complained about the barriers that self-monitoring used to require, such as paper diaries, referencing calorie charts, and the commitment of your time. Recording weight on e-scales has been demonstrated to be extremely accurate and better matches the results taken on calibrated clinical scales. Moreover, e-scales do not require data to be recorded in a paper log and encourage a better self-weighing frequency. Although the latest self-monitoring technologies should be embraced to track your weight, dietary intake, and daily exercise routine, these are tools and shouldn’t be viewed as a lifestyle intervention.

Here at Metabolic Research Center, our approach is to restore your energy and stamina, so you are less likely to experience unwanted food cravings when following a personalized menu plan. Plus, MRC can provide the education needed for accurate self-regulation.