Daily Tracking of Lifestyle Interventions for Better Results

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Self-monitoring of food intake and daily exercise is often associated with a relatively immediate decrease in body weight. Information recorded in food and exercise diaries is useful in identifying challenging personal and environmental factors. An effective use of behavior and lifestyle modifications to manage your weight for living healthy requires developing efficient skills for self-monitoring and self-regulation of knowledgeable weight loss strategies.

Whereas permanent weight loss and weight management requires your active participation, weight loss specialists can provide you with the education needed to make knowledgeable food choices to promote better outcomes when combined with your exercise routine. Recent changes to scientific weight loss strategies that are recommended for use with low-calorie diet are the inclusion of nutrition education, targeted exercise, self-monitoring, and support networks.

How Reward-Based Lifestyle Habits Help

Evaluation, judgement, and feedback occur at least partially through the phasic activity of the midbrain to signal the reward-based learning of new lifestyle habits. Listed below are four benefits of tracking your food, weight and daily exercise:

1) Documents Cause and Effect – Self-monitoring is a strategy that requires you to self-assess and document the “cause and effect” of lifestyle changes for dietary and exercise habits.

2) Helps You Sustain Motivation – Although self-monitoring is merely the act of observing, measuring, and recording your behavior, one of the primary benefits is that self-regulation helps you sustain motivation for reaching and maintaining your weight loss goals.

3) Establishes Achievable Goals – Technology is changing and improving self-monitoring techniques for better daily compliance to lifestyle interventions on a daily basis.

4) Real Time Measurement of Progress – In our technologically active world, online food logs and exercise diaries are a convenient way to track real time measurements of your daily weight loss progress.

Developing Self-Monitoring Skills is Essential for Success

Achieving healthy living and maintaining a sustainable weight for the long-term includes lifestyle interventions that focus on eating better and engaging in daily physical activities. To understand how metabolic health can impact weight gain, weight loss and weight regain, you must consider the role that hormones (like insulin) play in how your body processes energy needs based on your dietary and exercise habits. A recent study conducted by Duke University found that without following a particular diet plan overweight participants who tracked his or her daily food intake using a low-cost phone app lost a significant amount of weight.

To learn more about learning self-monitoring skills to maintain a healthy weight, contact the weight loss specialists at MRC. Here at Metabolic Research Center, our weight loss specialists have been personalizing plans for more than three decades.