Know What Works for You and What Doesn’t

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Self-monitoring provides a way for you to evaluate the techniques that are working for you and those that aren’t. That way, you can self-regulate changes in eating and activity to focus on those things that are contributing to effective weight loss. Through self-regulation, you can use techniques developed by cognitive behavior therapists to identify specific triggers that lead to overeating and negative attitudes that support your more sedentary lifestyle.

Tracking also provides a way for you to evaluate which techniques and strategies are working and how changes in eating and exercise behaviors are contributing to weight loss and weight control. Recent changes to scientific weight loss strategies that are recommended for use with low-calorie diet are the inclusion of nutrition education, medical therapies, targeted exercise programs, self-monitoring of results, and support networks.

Why Follow Self-Regulation Strategies?

In self-regulation theories, motivation relies on a proactive anticipatory system and a reactive negative feedback system to reduce the discrepancy between your goals and your behaviors. Listed below are four benefits of tracking your food, weight and daily exercise:

1) Documents Cause and Effect – The more complex and detailed your food exercise diaries, the better the feedback for assessing and documenting of the cause and effect of lifestyle interventions.

2) Helps You Sustain Motivation – Self-monitoring is a helpful tool that allows you to keep both an exercise diary and food diary in real time to help sustain your motivation for better weight control.

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.

Personalized Programs to Support Your Needs

Maintaining a healthy weight isn’t about following a restrictive diet. It’s about monitoring the lifestyle changes in daily food intake and exercise habits to ensure you are on track to achieve healthy living that will reduce your risk for negative health conditions. If you feel like you have been doing everything right like eating less and moving more but no matter how hard you try you are not losing weight, a personalized program with an eating and activity routine that is right for your biology may be the answer. If your bathroom scale seems to be stuck at the same weight, it could be that you haven’t developed the self-monitoring techniques needed to track the lifestyle interventions you have already put in place.

When you choose Metabolic Research Center as your partner for living healthy, we teach you how to self-monitor your dietary intake in a way that satisfies your hunger and puts you in control, whether you choose to eat in or dine out.