Tracking Healthy Habits leads to weight loss success!

It isn’t the only way to be successful, but it is a great way to succeed. Weight loss like anything else in life worth having takes work.

With that said, creating and tracking healthy habits to lose weight provides a lifelong framework for success.

Great books that support Habits:

There are a lot of books on the market about habits. A long time ago, I read Stephen Covey’s, 7 Habits of Highly Successful People.

Most recently, books like Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear provide a path for building any kind of habit.

Or how about the Compound Effect-Jumpstart Your Income, Your Life, Your Success by Darren Hardy.

None of these books are about weight loss, but each of these books do discuss using habits to lose weight. 🙂

Creating new habits provide you with an external motivator. Habits also provide feedback on your journey that keeps you going!

Read more below to help you learn why you should track healthy habits.

I bet there are some habits that you may not have considered as part of your weight loss journey.  And there are some apps you can use to track these habits.

Healthy Habits To Lose Weight: Why?

Focusing on the number on the scale makes for a slow, inconsistent weight loss journey.  

If you have 100 pounds or more to lose, finding easy habits you can implement and track increase the feeling of success.

This feeling of success is awesome!  

What’s awesome about it?  It keeps you motivated!

Motivation in your weight loss journey is what it’s all about!  In my case, I had over 100 pounds to lose, focusing on the scale alone was a horrible dredge on the journey!  

Finding little wins along the way, made they journey enjoyable and made me feel like a winner!  

Who doesn’t want to feel like a winner?

So by creating goals that support your weight loss journey you increase that feeling of success.  And creating habits that support the goal improves your chances of success.

On the other hand, if you focus only on that number on the scale, it can be a long painful journey.  And this journey is often filled with inconsistency and long train rides in the wrong direction.

Unfortunatly, we can’t control the speed with which our body loses weight, beyond lowering our calories and increasing our activity.

One way to really change your lifestyle is to implement healthy habits that support your weight loss journey.  But to create habits, we have to change what we are doing and we can control that.

Tracking these changes is a game, and a game changer!

Healthy Habits to Lose Weight: What Makes a Habit Trackable?

It needs to be finite!  You need to be able to put a number to it.  How many times did you…

It should support your goal of weight loss but it shouldn’t be just the number on the scale.

To be trackable it should be something you do a few times per day or week.  Or something you are shooting to do a few times per day/week.

There are a lot of habits we can track..

Good habits to track include

• Number of steps
• Amounts of water
• Saying positive affirmations
• Amount of veggies eaten
• Number of times avoided junk foo

But there are a lot more see, below…

Healthy Habits to Lose Weight:  Choose Habits That Support Your Weight Loss Goal!

Breaking habits into 4 different categories makes the search a little easier.  These categories are Nutrition habits, Fitness habits, Mental Health habits and Lifestyle habits.

Each of these habits lead to a healthy lifestyle, and a healthy lifestyle leads to a healthy weight.  And isn’t that what each of us are trying to accomplish?

There are nutrition habits

• Make just one meal a little healthier
• Chose a healthier option
• eating vegetables
• Avoiding sugar
• eating whole foods
• limiting processed foods
• Drinking water
• Eating more leafy greens
• Eating enough calories
• Not eating too many calories
• Eating according to “your” schedule

There are fitness habits

• Work out 3 times a week
• Move your body at least 30 minutes a day
• Stretch daily/ or every few days
• Include some cardio
• Include some resistence training

Mental health

• Meditate
• Positive affirmations
• Journal
• Live in the moment as often as possible

Lifestyle Habits:

• Meal Planning
• Meal Prepping
• Get 7-9 hours of sleep
• Weighing daily

Each of these habits helps to move forward our weight loss journey!

But notice, not one of them is just the number on the scale!  And we can take small daily action and see immediate satisfaction with feedback from a sheet of paper or one of the App’s I discuss later.

Habits are the gold of a weight loss journey.  It’s important to note, they also help us be better versions of ourselves.

Importantly, habits allow us to focus on something that isn’t the number on the scale.

If you look above you will see, I did add weighing daily.  I do weigh-in daily as a small part of my tracking.

That number on the scale is one part of the information I collect to provide feedback.  But because it is such a small part of the information it doesn’t overwhelm me.

I also track if I read a motivational book for 10 minutes a day.  🙂

Healthy Habits to Lose Weight: What Apps can I use?

There are a lot of Apps out there, I am only listing the ones here that I use daily. I prefer apps because we always have our phones on use.

Apps remove the need to “wait to record”. There are no excuses, if you have it on your phone.

Fitnes Trackers Apps:

• Fitbit
• Fitocracy
• BodySpace
• MapMyRun

Nutrition Trackers:

• MyFittnessPal
• LoseIT
• MyPlate.Gov

General Habit Trackers:

• Habitfy
• Habitbull

Each of these apps are tools to track a different kind of habit.  

Healthy Habits to Lose Weight: Why Tracking Improves Consistency

One of the hardest things about weight loss is the waiting…  

Waiting is hard in a world where we get instantaneous feedback on everything we do.  

For example, the ding of the toaster and  the chime of our phone for each email, text, meeting alert… All Instantaneous Feedback!

All of these instant responses just make weight loss even harder.  To clarify, tracking habits that are not scale related give us instant feedback several times a day if we set it that way.

The real challenge is finding new habits that support your weight loss goal.   Above all, they need to light your fire.

Case in point, tracking healthy habits provides a way to give positive feedback in much shorter intervals than the scale.

Let’s Wrap Up-Healthy Habits for Weight Loss!

As I made my way through my weight loss journey, tracking my habits kept me on track.  I often joke, I traded my food addiction for a healthy habit addiction.

You will often find me checking my phone for my step count, or to see that I have tracked some activity.  

I track my food, my weighing, my workouts, if I read, meal planning…

I personally use the obvious trackers listed above and Habitfy… But there are a ton of app’s.  

Most of the trackers allow for tracking 3 free habits without a purchase.  

I recommend only implementing 1 habit at time because more than that can feel overwhelming.  

Make your journey to add habits a fun game, not an additional stressor!

YOUR NEXT STEPS:

1. Decide what you want to track.
2. Start doing it in managable chunks.
3. Find the app to track it, or buy a travel notebook to track.
4. Begin tracking!
5. Look for steady improvement
6. When you meet your goal every day for 10 days, add a chunk
7. Keep Building!

Sending you love and hugs on your journey!

Resources:

• Healthy fit-tech Habits Gone Bad
• ACE Mover Must Haves: Physical-activity Trackers
• Hack Your Habits