Monitor yourself

Habit Guide: Monitor Yourself
Article By: WeightWatchers.com

Learn to adopt healthy habits.
A mindful eye can motivate you! It helps your efforts when you keep an eye on the way you eat.
Monitoring Yourself Means...
Keep track of your POINTS® values.
Taking note of the way you feel—your hunger signals and emotions—just before and after you eat.
On either food plan, looking for other ways to make yourself more aware of the way you eat such as noticing when you eat, when you snack, whether you follow the Good Health Guidelines and more.
Using your Weight Tracker to track your weight once a week.
Watching your progress with exercise.
It makes sense to Monitor Yourself."Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out." -Robert Collier.
Let's face it: there's food everywhere, and it's easy to eat. But when we pay attention to the way we eat, it's easier to notice when we're overdoing it.
When we're not paying attention, we tend to let all the little BLTS—bites, licks and tastes—slide by. Things that don't exactly fit into our plans don't register, because they seem too small to make a difference. But little bits add up.
When we don't keep track, we miss out on an opportunity to rein ourselves in when things are going off track. The power of a keyboard is amazing. When you know you'll have to type in that you're about to eat something even though you're not really hungry, you're less likely to take that last cookie.
Self-monitoring helps us maintain the kind of control that inspires us and moves us closer to our goals. If it helps at all, think of it as measuring for motivation.
Lisa, from St. Louis, MO, lost 71.1 pounds and says, "It's helpful for me to keep track—it holds me accountable. When I review my journal, and I think 'Why did I gain?' I can see it. I can also see why I lost. I use that knowledge to my advantage as I make decisions about what to eat."
Monitoring Yourself is a helpful habit because:
It offers you the best chance for successful weight loss, according to a study by the Center for Behavioral Medicine in Chicago.*
It increases your awareness—of what you eat and when you eat and the way you feel when you're eating.
Knowledge is power and armed with this information, you're able to focus on behaviors that are making it more difficult for you to succeed.
When you can see how you're doing—at the scalen and with your exercise efforts—you can make changes, and celebrate successes.
If you realize you need to Monitor Yourself...Make use of the online tools like POINTS Tracker and Weight Tracker to measure and monitor your weight, food, and activity progress.
*Statistics quoted are from a survey of 1200 Weight Watchers Meetings Members conducted in the UK during 2003 to assess their habits. **Boutelle, K.N., Kirschenbaum, DS Obesity Research, 1998; 6(3): 219-24.