Self-Monitoring Makes It Goal Attainment Easier

---

Recent studies have shown that your readiness and personal motivation to self-monitor and self-regulate your weight loss and weight management strategies are key components for managing a successful weight-loss journey. Through self-monitoring and self-regulation, any temporary loss of weight control or relapse to old behaviors can be easily identified to reduce the damages. Nonetheless, reestablishing control quickly is crucial to avoid a setback.

A comprehensive weight management program will work best if you have selected a weight range within which you can realistically live your life. Healthy living also requires doing those things that minimize health risks. Monitoring eating patterns and daily physical activities are key to successful weight maintenance to support healthy living. Plus, it’s important to anticipate and identify problems that threaten to undermine your weight loss success.

Tips to Make Your Journey Easier

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 – 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 of weight, dietary intake and physical activity is a valuable component of scientific weight loss plans that allow you to build healthy habits for long-term weight control and is key for weight management.

3) Tracks Body Mass Index – Monitoring what you are doing requires deliberate attention being paid to the changes in your body mass index in response to lifestyle interventions for dietary intake and increases in physical activity.

4) Easier to Focus on What Works – If you are considering a weight loss journey towards living a happy, healthy life, learning self-monitoring skills can make it easier to focus on what works rather than wait months to make adjustments to daily diet and exercise.

Self-Monitoring Should Also Become a New Habit

Since weight changes can have health implications, self-monitoring your weight loss efforts allows you to make crucial adjustments to new habits that you made to your dietary intake and daily physical activities. The process of making changes to habits requires well developed self-regulatory skills that include self-monitoring, self-evaluation and the appropriate self-reinforcement for the progress made based on real-time changes in weight. 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.

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.