Each week I will elaborate on one of seven steps that I have taken to begin transforming myself into the healthy and fit person that I want to be. Click here to view the 7 steps (Havi’s 7).
Step 3: Monitor you progress
This week we’ll discuss why it’s important that you monitor your progress. As I mentioned in the initial post about the 7 steps, it’s important to monitor your progress so that you’ll either get positive reinforcement when doing well or you’ll have a better idea on what to change if you’re not doing well. When I write that you need to monitor your progress I mean to take it much further than just recording your weight and measurements. That’s definitely important and you should already be doing that regularly, but I want you to monitor your food intake and exercise as well.
There are many reasons for monitoring your food intake and exercise. For starters, studies have shown that every time you mark a task as completed on a to-do list your body will release a small amount of endorphins. This gives you a nice positive reinforcement and if done regularly can almost lead to a slight addiction. Yes, you read that right, you can become addicted to being productive. This is one of the reasons it’s beneficial to monitor your food and exercise. If you set a daily caloric goal for example, after monitoring your day’s progress you can check off that you accomplished your goal for the day and get that positive reinforcement. Similarly, if you set a goal of exercising 6 days a week for 40 minutes a day, you can record when you workout and again get that positive reinforcement. Doing these things will lead to the release of those endorphins and you could actually become addicted to eating right and working out! You’ll find that over time you’ll procrastinate less and cheat less, which in turn will lead to you reaching your overall health and fitness goals.
The other side of the coin is that if you find you’re not moving towards your overall at the rate you like, you can more easily intervene. There are some great online communities out there filled with people that genuinely want to help others get healthy. Some are experts, some aren’t, but by reaching out in these communities you can get a lot of advice rather quickly. Obviously, the best route would be to talk with a professional but either way you go it’ll make it much easier to help you if others can know specifically what you’re doing.
So the following are two tools I use to monitor my progress:
1. TeamBeachbody.com
This is a great site with a great community that I use daily to help track my fitness goals. My favorite part about this site is something called the WOWY Supergym. There you can schedule and complete workouts. Additionally, they have a cool down chat room that you can hang out in when you’re done working out. However the best part is that each day when you complete a workout in their gym you have the opportunity to enter a daily contest of up to $1000. It’s definitely worth checking out and you can sign up for free here and you can check out my profile here.
2. My Fitness Pal
This is a great site that also has a great community that I use regularly to help track my food intake. They have a pretty large database of foods so that all you have to do is search for the foods you ate (or scan if you have the free phone up) and it will pull up all the nutritional information for you to easily keep track of what you’re putting in your body. This site also has a Facebook-like set up in that you can find other people with similar interests and goals, friend them, and see status updates on how they’re doing. This site is also free to use and you can check it out their site here and my profile here.
No comments:
Post a Comment