Self Awareness and Fitness Success

By John A. Mays, MSEd

Your behavior plays a significant role in weight gain/loss. Understanding and learning to modify behaviors that contributed to developing obesity is one of the best ways to treat the disease of obesity either alone or in conjunction with other treatments.

Behavior change strategies

include

Self-monitoring

Increasing physical activity

Becoming educated about the body and how to nourish it appropriately

Engaging in a support group

Setting realistic goals

Self-monitoring

Scientists have proven that weight loss is way more complex than simply eating less calories than you burn off. Though, monitoring how many calories you consume and how active you are continues to be beneficial to self-awareness. Because self-monitoring is critical for success with lifestyle changes, it is important to look at the self-monitoring techniques.

Self-monitoring refers to observing and recording of eating, drinking and physical activity patterns. The goal of self-monitoring is to increase self-awareness of daily behaviors and outcomes, thus it can serve as an early warning system if problems arise and can it help track success.

Commonly Used Self-monitoring Techniques

Food diaries

Regular self-weighing

Exercise logs

High-tech tools such as Fitbitactivity trackers, pedometers, accelerometers and metabolic devices

All of these techniques can be utilized simultaneously to track patterns in daily activity. You can then use those patterns to determine which behaviors tend to result in weight gain versus weight-loss. To optimize your weight-loss, focus on making the healthy patterns part of your long-term lifestyle change.

With technological advancements, self-monitoring techniques are changing and improving your ability to think like athletes and advanced level individuals who are naturally self-aware.