I know we all think we are masters of feeling when we lose or gain weight. We believe that if we are just in tune with ourselves and in a good place, the weight will drop. While this has some validity, the truth is, we were given both emotions AND logic for a reason. If you want to truly lose weight and keep it off, you’ll have to come to terms with objectively measuring where you’re at. Unfortunately, without a cartesian approach to measuring your gains or losses, your emotions can get the better of you and one day you could wake up 20lbs heavier without even knowing how you got there (spoken from experience).
When you track your progress, you not only become apter at knowing how your body reacts to different eating patterns, you also become more familiar with standard portion sizes, calories, and weight. So how can you measure your progress? With a scale, measuring tape or a food app. In the beginning, I suggest trying certain patterns of eating in 1-week intervals. This allows you to see how that eating style affects you without the burden of daily tracking.
For tape measuring, measure around the largest part of your chest, arms, stomach, and thighs with a soft measuring tape. This method is cheap and easy. Annotate each measurement with the date. Having a writer progress log is imperative to keep you accountable and to help you see your progress.
If you can handle daily food tracking, which I suggest everyone experience for at least a week, get a free food tracking app on your phone. What’s great about tracking is that it enables you to understand when you are eating more or less than you think, familiarizes you with calories, and helps you understand macronutrients. Popular apps include MyFitnessPal, FatSecret, and CarbManager. Different apps focus on alternate parameters and have varying user interfaces, so I suggest downloading a couple of free ones and seeing which one you like best before making a final decision. These parameters are usually calories, macronutrients, and/or energy expenditure. You can also try one for a week and if it doesn’t work for you, change it. Though using a tracking app in the long-term may feel like an eating disorder in the making, it is actually a very good tool to retrain yourself into eating better.
Then there’s the infamous scale. I personally lost 20 lbs. thanks to my greatest asset, my humble scale. Weighing myself consistently allowed me to discover how different ways of eating affected my weight as well as my energy and wellbeing. Of course, you will have days when your weight changes due to water retention or increased muscle (if you exercise) but it’s an easy way to make sure that you’re progressing downwards. Write down your progress in your progress log. Again, if you don’t like to overdo the weighing, start by weighing yourself once a week and annotate this in your progress log with the dates. Make sure to always way yourself at the same time of day. In the morning after waking and using the loo, is usually the best choice. Some scales come in combo with measuring tape, see here. There are some modern scales that are really helpful because they also provide you with your body fat, muscle mass, bone density and water weight.
Last, the simplest most rewarding but sometimes challenging method is tracking your weight loss by how your clothes feel. This method feels great when you lose weight but may not be as accurate when you gain weight due to denial mechanisms like sticking to our loser clothing when we unconsciously know something’s wrong. One tactic is to put away all your heavier clothes in the garage or attic and only keep your skinny clothes in the closet. You’ll automatically know when you need to take the reins in on eating. I recommend this method as an adjunct and not as the sum total of your weight loss tracking because it’s easier to lie to yourself about the fit of your clothes. I have literally found myself stating out loud that there’s a problem with the drying machine shrinking my clothes and worse believing my folly. It’s one thing to pretend your clothes have shrunk, yet another to contradict a written NUMBER from your scale, measuring tape, or tracking app that’s recorded.
So there you have it. Track away if you’re serious about losing weight. If you need assistance, feel free to email me about my nutrition consulting.