How to Monitor Strategies for Healthy Living

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Self-assessment allows 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 limit daily physical activity.

The primary goals of any plan for living healthy should include behavioral strategies for weight control based on an increase in physical activities, a reduction in daily caloric intake by altering eating habits, and other lifestyle changes. Additional techniques involving self-behaviors that can be combined with basic weight loss strategies include only eating at meal time, leaving the table after eating, and avoiding the grocery store when you’re hungry.

How Monitoring Can Benefit Weight Loss

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 – Dietary self-monitoring by recording energy intake in a food log is only useful for individual feedback but when combined with weigh-ins and an exercise diary can document the cause and effect of lifestyle interventions.

2) Helps You Sustain Motivation – Self-monitoring increases awareness, curiosity and consciousness for tracking your progress for living a healthier life. It can reveal problematic behaviors as well as inspire accountability to help sustain the motivation needed for successful weight control.

3) Establishes Achievable Goals – Self-monitoring of dietary intake and engagement in physical activities can help you establish achievable goals and stay better motivated during the goal attainment process. Plus, practicing self-regulation enhances weight management for healthy living.

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.

Following a Restrictive Diet Is Not Healthy Weight Loss

Healthy weight loss is all about monitoring the lifestyle changes in daily food intake and exercise habits to ensure you are on track and achieve healthy living to reduce your risk for negative health conditions. 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 its energy needs based on your dietary and exercise habits. A recent study conducted by Duke University also found that without following a particular diet plan overweight participants who tracked his or her daily food intake using a low-cost smartphone app lost a significant amount of weight.

At Metabolic Research Center, we deliver healthy strategies tailored to your body’s specific needs for dietary intake and exercise. Personalized actionable lifestyle interventions lead to long-term success for healthy living for a lifetime.