Healthy Living for an Aging Body

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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 with long-term weight control; but developing self-monitoring skills is highly recommended. The long-term success you will enjoy after working to lose weight will depend on your willingness to self-monitor, self-assess, and self-regulate a follow-up plan for weight maintenance.

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 good balance as you age can be crucial to healthy living.

Why Track Lifestyle Interventions for Losing Weight?

Behavioral interventions are a central aspect in promoting healthy lifestyle changes that can lead to weight loss and prevent weight regain by self-monitoring of your daily activities. Listed below are four benefits of tracking your food, weight and daily exercise:

1) Learn More About Your Body – The current gold standard for clinical weight loss is called behavioral weight loss that is achieved thru self-monitoring and self-regulation of lifestyle interventions based on learning more about your body.

2) Builds Healthy Habits – Through self-monitoring, you will learn how to get to the place you want to be as you build the healthy habits needed to get you to your goals by making informed adjustments to eating better and exercising more often.

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 to lose.

4) Easier to Focus on What Works – Self-monitoring creates awareness of behaviors, increases accountability to those behaviors, and makes it easier for you to focus on what works for your body. Those assessments can help you achieve your weight loss goals.

Self-Regulation Is Important for Weight Loss

When science is applied to shedding unwanted pounds, it typically involves an increase in energy expenditure, decrease in energy intake, and the use of tracking strategies such as self-monitoring and self-regulation of key lifestyle interventions. Successful self-regulation of lifestyle interventions that are implemented as weight control strategies depends on the truthfulness, consistency and timeliness of recording changes that can help you attain your goals. Comprehensiveness of self-monitoring of one’s dietary intake had no impact on weight change during a weight control study but frequent self-monitoring of interventions produced beneficial effects for healthy living.

Regardless of the type of weight loss plan that you are considering, ultimately you should choose a program that teaches self-monitoring of lifestyle interventions, encourages you to make better choices, and supports your goals for healthy living.