Weight loss tracking is one of the most helpful techniques you can use to get your lifestyle under control. Using apps, wearable fitness trackers and other tools gives you practical, real-time, usable information. It offers you a customized look at your information right now as well as your trends over time. This helps to get to know your strengths, your weaknesses, and where you can make some powerful changes.
Still, it’s easy to become obsessed with weight loss tracking. With all the different forms of data available to us through these various means, we can lose track of what it is to live our lives in a healthy way. Instead, we check, check again, then re-check our steps, calories, carbs, proteins, fats, heart rate, active minutes, stairs climbed, and virtually everything else that can be measured and crunched into charts and graphs.
The Weight Loss Tracking Problem
Weight loss tracking that obsessively may be helpful over the short term but over the longer term, it risks the development of an unhealthy and/or unsustainable relationship with your new lifestyle. Do you really want to be tracking and judging these figures for the rest of your life? If not, then you will likely find it very difficult to maintain any successes you achieve through these figures.
That said, if you can’t use weight loss tracking in this way to lose weight, then what is the alternative? How do you keep on top of everything if you don’t have figures and data to guide you? There are two main schools of thought in this arena.
Alternatives to Traditional Weight Loss Tracking
The first is to use an app meant to track your weight, lifestyle habits and other data in terms of the trends you build, not in terms of your day to day figures. By choosing that type of weight loss tracking, you’ll still be able to find out your strengths and weaknesses, but without fixating on every tiny detail. Instead, you’ll get a feel for what you should be doing and what is bringing you results.
You won’t be kicking yourself over fifty calories or one hundred steps. You’ll see that you’ve done well over the last week and this helped you to lose more weight. Instead of seeing that you’ve lost a certain specific amount of weight, you’ll know that you’re on a healthy reduction trend.
On the other hand, if you really do love those numbers and find that this type of weight loss tracking helps you to stay motivated, take time off now and again.
Perhaps that means every Wednesday, you try to stay on track naturally without wearing your tracker. Maybe it means you stop all weight loss tracking for a week every second month. Breaking the cycle can help you to return your brain to a healthier, less obsessive mindset.