More nutrition...... and today we are talking MONITORING and how this simple task can be so effective for weight loss

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For those that haven’t seen the previous 2 posts go back and have a read.

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This series is aimed at taking you through how we do our nutrition shizzle with our clients, the process we take them through, the stuff we think is important....

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And more importantly the stuff that works and gets results

So on with the show ....

 

 

As we said last post, the quality of what you eat will make a difference...so simply picking better options will have a positive effect

The next stage that we suggest is to monitor what you eat, and for this to happen you need to get started by recording what you eat...YES EVERYTHING!

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This is beneficial for a number of reasons:

 

Firstly it gets you used to recording and monitoring what you are eating, which will become a more useful tool as the process goes on when we might have to get a little more accurate to achieve further goals (not necessarily though)

 

It will also make you mindful of what you are eating right now! Which, believe it or not, isn’t very common?

We are surrounded by and marketed at by a whole load of convenience foods that taste nice, are snack size but pack a whole lot of energy.

 

Often we eat on the fly and studies show the amount of food we actually recall eating can be as low as 50%...so often UNDERESTIMATE the amount we are taking on and subsequently overeat.

 

Plus trying to recall what you have consumed is a totally useless idea...you will forget a LOT of what youve eaten..trust me!

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Once you start writing down this stuff and seeing what you eat as well as the possibility of someone else (your personal trainer/ dietician etc) seeing what you eat, generally people will eat less, ‘cleaner’ or more healthily. You can also see if there are certain foods you are not getting enough of...fruits/ veg/ oily fish etc...This will get the programme underway nicely

 

Finally it will help you plan out what you are going to eat. You can see meals that kept you fuller, perhaps didn’t need a snack after.

 

You can see days where you maybe you ate more and can plan for those and remember good foods/ meals that were easy to cook and will help you going forward

 

To do this there are a couple of ways:

 

Ol’ fashioned pen and paper

 

Food diaries are easy to find, buy or simply make from a journal to fill in. As long as you have it to hand when needed, so its easy to carry around its fine.

 

Phone app

There are loads out there but my fitness pal is probably the best, easy to use and has the largest database of food types in there

 

Photos

A method some people use is to track what they are eating by simply taking photographs of everything they eat...like a pictorial journal

 

Whichever method you pick, make sure its one you will use, keep with you as required and is as little effort as possible

 

If you don’t stick to it for a day, don’t just blow the whole thing off...get straight back on track the next day and start again.......any details are better than no details and these habits take a while to pick up

 

The other useful thing about this is you start to see trends, maybe certain evenings where you have a take away because you are tired, maybe you demolish a cake on certain times in the week

 

The patterns help give an insight into what's going on but also provide us with ways to help avoid them in future.