Journaling Your Weightloss
What is it?A weight-loss journal (or blog) is a diary of what you are doing — and hoping to do — to keep up and achieve your specific weight-loss goals. It's here that you can simply share your experiences in gaining, losing and maintaining your weight with others like you.
How can you use one?
You can take many approaches to your weight-loss journal. For example, you can use it to keep track of what you eat each day (or don't!), how your weight and measurements are changing, or how you're progressing toward your exercise goals. Along the way, you can celebrate your successes or get motivated after setbacks.
Why?
It's about holding yourself accountable. By recording tangible steps and carefully monitoring your weight-loss regimen, you'll be able to keep track of what's working and what's not — as well as address your eating and fitness habits.
Tips for starting your journal
1. Choose a fun, descriptive title.
2. Include a short sentence about your goals.
3. Add your journal to the "Weight management" category.
4. Allow as many as you'd like to read and comment on your posts (This for individuals who do their journaling on line).
http://www.revolutionhealth.com/healthy-living/weight-management/journal
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JOURNALING SITE
Weight loss with fitday
Successful weight loss requires careful attention to your diet and exercise. FitDay's free online diet & fitness journal is an easy and powerful tool designed to help you monitor and manage your own weight loss program.
Weight loss begins by choosing a healthy goal weight. In FitDay, you can easily set a weight loss goal and deadline. Progress reports keep you up-to-date on the status of your goal.
Experts agree that journaling your foods and activities is an excellent way to adhere to a weight loss program. FitDay's online diet & fitness journal provides a central location where you can track the foods you eat and exercises you do each day.
There are many strategies for achieving weightloss, but all require careful attention to key aspects of your diet and exercise. In particular, you must manage your intake of calories, fat, carbohydrates, and protein, as well as your level of physical activity. By analyzing your diet & fitness journal, FitDay will provide you with this critical information every day.
A healthy weight loss program must pay careful attention to proper nutrition. This means getting your RDA (recommended dietary allowance) for all nutrients. FitDay tells you your intake of all major vitamins and minerals and whether you're meeting your RDAs.
To monitor your progress, FitDay allows to you track your weight as it changes. You can generate weight loss charts to view your progress.
In short, FitDay is a simple and effective tool to help you manage your weight loss program. FitDay is a free product.
http://www.fitday.com/WebFit/weightloss.html
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How to Keep a Weightloss Journal
Successful weight loss requires careful attention to your daily diet and exercise. In essence you are making a conscious life style choice. There is no easy way - you are in it for the long haul. Once you have made the decision to alter your image and the way you live, you have to implement it and keep on implementing it for the rest of your life. Sometimes it will be real hard to do this. Sometimes you will lose heart and want to hurl in the towel. Your journal is a hard record of what you have achieved so far. Use and look at your achievements when you are down or unmotivated.Keeping a record or weight loss journal of the foods you eat, the exercises you do and the weight you lose is an excellent way to adhere to a weight loss program and keep you motivated. Sometimes its hard to share your successes with others and having a permanent record on paper or on your computer is an excellent way of demonstrating your progress to yourself and others.
There are many ways to do this:-
Use a diary
Use a scrapbook
Use a loose leaf file
Use a photo album
Use a commercial spreadsheet like Excel
Use an online one.
This is a personal record for yourself and you can put anything you like in it. Here are a few typical weight loss journal topics:-
Your goals and the time frame.
Your successes.
Your milestones.
Inspiration, role models, other success stories.
Your daily diet program.
Your weight.
Your weight loss.
Calories consumed.
Fat, carbohydrates and protein intakes.
What exercise you did and for how long.
Medical/dietitian visits.
Personal Health Items
Recipes that work.
Magazine and press clippings or articles.
Personal Comments.
Its always a good idea to start your journal off with a goal. This should be what you aim to be. This not only gives you a target but in your mind's eye you will have a vision of the new you. Do not set unrealisitic goals! Set something attainable and when you get there you will have a milestone under your belt. You can then set a new goal.
The second thing that needs to go in your journal is your diet and exercise plan. This is just as important as setting a goal. You need to have plan as to how you are going to get there. Remember you need to eat a proper balanced diet!! Get a registered dietitian to give you a properly planned eating schedule that suits your lifestyle. Good dietitians will taylor make your new diet to suit the type of life you live and the people who you share your life with.
Scrapbooking is a fun way of keeping a weight loss journal. Scrap books are immensely flexible and provide hours of entertainment. Its a great hobby as well. Many successful weight loss people have used scrap books as an aid. The big beauty of a scrap book is the ability to keep notes and add photographs such as before and after shots. Some people put clothes label sizes in their scrap book.
http://www.am-i-fat.com/weight_loss_journal.html
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Weightloss Journal
Keeping a weight loss journal or any life journal has many advantages and benefits. Whether you write a little or a lot you can record and track plenty of information that can be easily retained for future reference. You can actually see what you were thinking because your thoughts and experiences are in your weight loss journal. When you commit to writing your thoughts down, you have put your experiences into a solid form. Below are some examples of the benefits of keeping a weight loss journal.Track Your Progress - You will be able to write down your starting measurements, and everything you have eaten for the day. You will also be able to write down all a of the negatives that you were thinking for the day and turning those negatives into positive thoughts.
Setting goals and resolutions - You will actually see and fully understand what you want, what is important to you, and how you feel, by keeping a weight loss journal. Then you can create goals and resolutions to support what you are thinking and writing about.
Reduce stress - Keeping a weight loss journal has a proven benefit of reducing stress during your journey. writing your thoughts down in a journal, expresses everything you feel for that day, therefore releasing a tremendous amount of stress.
Helps focus - Writing in a journal creates more personal awareness, and therefore more focus on the issues that are important to you. The routine and habit of creating a weight loss journal means making time for you - When you set aside time for yourself, you can feel the benefit and gain from doing something specifically for yourself. It can show up in other areas of your life as you carry that time you have spent on yourself within you, and everywhere you go.
Organizes - a weight loss journal allows you to set goals for what you want to accomplish for the day, the month, the year, or a lifetime, is an excellent tool to help you get those things done. You can create a personal checklist of "things to do."
Start your journal on any day of the year - A weight loss journal is something you can start today or any time for that matter. You can start and stop as you want. You can skip a day. It is your weight loss journal. Remember one thing though, the more you write, the more successful you are likely to be.
Other Journal Ideas - When keeping any journal, you can record your experiences, dreams, ideas, desires, thoughts and more, for reflecting on now, and any ideas you have for the future. You are telling your story to yourself in a positive way.
Can better understand and accept yourself and others - Whether you re-read your weight loss journal or not, you can gain benefits from writing down your story, and your thoughts. You are writing about how you see and experience life through change. You can compare and explore the times of your life - Awareness of the past can teach and support your future.
Creates a good personal reminder - As you journal the times of your life, if you are still writing about the same things over and over, it can help support your idea of what is working in your life and what is not. You are creating a record, and with that record in hand it is easier to see patterns, changes, and shifts. You can always ask yourself, "What do I want to carry with me?"
Provides personal growth and freedom - A weight loss journal can be a wonderful tool to help better understand yourself and the world that surrounds you during difficult times.
Records and tracks business, personal or financial information - There are many ways to benefit from a journal because of the variety of uses. A business journal can track appointments, meetings, finances, or log data. A personal journal can be about dreams, family, health, diets, weight loss, hobbies, travel, or any other topic you want to record and track.
Becomes a treasured keepsake, a written scrapbook - A journal is a catalog of your memories. Over time, your memories become an irreplaceable treasure that can be looked at years from now, by you, or, if you wish, by others.
Journals are great gifts for friends, family or to give yourself - You can give
the benefits of a journal to a friend, or to yourself. With the benefits of a journal in mind, and the insights and power it can give to someone else or to YOU, consider a journal. If you never have written a journal, consider starting.
So many people try to lose weight on their own and unfortunately suffer the consequences by negatively altering their metabolism, thyroid, and hormonal function. When this occurs weight loss becomes impossible and no diets will work. We can help YOU today and give you the on-going support you need!
http://www.tbfinc.com/weight_loss_journal.htm
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Track your Fitness Online
Article By: Jennifer GrudenFitness websites offer great information on diet and nutrition – and a free or inexpensive way to monitor your progress.
If you've resolved to get fit or lose weight this year, you're not alone – both rank among the most popular New Year's resolutions as measured by a Harris interactive survey in the U.S. But it's all too easy to let these goals fall by the wayside.
Enter the fitness tracking website. Although it's a little counterintuitive to track fitness online – after all you are sitting at the computer while you're doing it – these sites can provide individuals with a free or inexpensive way to monitor their progress. And tracking steps to meet a goal is an essential component of meeting them. Here are some sites to explore.
SparkPeople.com
This site claims to host the “world's largest healthy living community” – and there are good reasons for it. Not only does the site have a lot of great information on diet and nutrition, recipes, and regular email newsletters – it also has a community feel with a lot of online support. I particularly like that it's possible to join the “healthy living” plan that doesn't focus on weight loss so much as good nutrition. I also like the way the site presents information in different areas – nutrition and diet, motivation, exercise, and wellness.
Getting started is quick and easy. It's similar to getting set up on other sites we mention below. First you select a user name and enter a bit of personal information; once you have created an account you can begin to set up more specific plans and goals. One feature of this particular site is that you can track specific nutrients in your diet (the site offers 75 to select from), so if you are particularly interested in something like calcium, the site will manage that for you.
If you like, the site will develop specific meal plans for you. It also creates a page for you where you can track your progress (and invite others to view it). The sidebar along the right hand side of the page shows a recipe and exercise of the day as well as other motivational components. Online videos show how to do new exercises safely.
Message boards are available for those who want to support and be supported by other users of the site. The site also awards “trophies” for logging in and using the features, which can encourage users to keep tracking their progress.
FitDay
FitDay is another one of the large free tracking sites. FitDay is great for individuals who don't feel the desire to connect with others, and just want a powerful tracking tool. The free online version can also be upgraded by paying for the desktop software.
One very useful tool in this tracking site is the calorie counter, which has a database of 40,000 foods. The interface is pretty easy to use – without a lot of the graphics and pictures that other sites contain – and the charts make it clear whether the user is meeting his or her goals or not. Like a ledger book this is the kind of tracking software that seems bare bones but gets you right to the bottom-line information about your goals.
Traineo.com
Traineo.com, the brainchild of four Harvard graduates, is geared almost entirely for weight loss, focusing on calories consumed and burned. Its interface is pretty friendly and the charts and graphs are very useful in identifying trends (let's not talk about what the holidays did to mine!)
Traineo also has a unique spin – it takes the idea of supportive friends and family a step further, encouraging the user to select 4 “motivators,” who receive weekly reports about the user's eating habits and weight loss or gain. This can be very useful for those who find announcing their goals to those they care about keeps them on track.
Walker Tracker
This is a single purpose, non-commercial site designed for those who use a pedometer to track their steps and set fitness goals.
Users record their steps, and can see their progress charted. The software also encourages users to keep a blog, or online journal, of their walks and days. What's so great about all that? The community of like-minded people provides inspiration and support, and the friendly competition to be one of the top walkers can help kick one's own drive to succeed into high gear. If this is your sport of choice, you'll probably find this to be a good destination.
Got a great site or a tip for getting fit or losing weight this year? Post in the 50Plus.com forums.
http://50plus.com/Health/BrowseAllArticles/index.cfm?t_offset=3&documentID=16456
