The 3 Most Important Weight Management Tools
Weight management and calorie tracking can seem daunting, but using different calorie tracking options can considerably improve your “diet” consistency and improve your overall food intake understanding to avoid common dieting blunders. Check out the following Weight Management Tools for best dietary practice and overall lifestyle change!
3 Weight Management Tracking Tools
These 3 basic Calorie Tracking Tools can help you follow your dietary plan by use of self-monitoring, maintaining adherence and preventing any relapses:
Scale
People that are investing in a lifestyle change to either promote weight gain, weight loss or to sustain a particular weight should be utilizing two scales to accurately measure progress. A daily scale should be used to track and analyze bodyweight. Often times bodyweight scales have additional parameters that use basic anthropometrics and bioimpedance technology to give an estimate body fat percentage. On average the margin of error for bioimpedance technology incorporated into bodyweight scales is approximately 4% for example an individual with an estimated body fat percentage of 27% would be within a range of 23-31% body fat. The technology is not the gold standard body fat percentage, however it’s more important that simple daily weight tracking is measured and documented to track overall daily and weekly weight fluctuations to better determine weight trends.
Another common scale that should be utilized for enhancing knowledge and general awareness of food consumption is a food scale. A vast majority of Americans overestimate the healthy food choices they have selected and underestimate the total caloric intake that they consume. This is especially true amongst overweight and obese individuals who consistently underestimate caloric intake, while underweight individuals tend to overestimate total calorie intake. Utilizing a weight scale can fine tune your understanding of total food intake, especially when analyzing protein, carbohydrate, and fat intake. Once you’ve gained an understanding and perception of portion control you can typically ditch the food scale (unless you need it for extreme uses such as dieting for a bodybuilding show, putting on mass for a movie, etc) and visualization to estimate food volume/calorie intake.
2. Calorie Tracking Tool
Another important tool to help track overall calorie intake, macronutrients, micronutrients and more is a calorie tracking tool, typically an app. Try testing out a few different calorie tracking tools and determine what fits best with your needs. A standard calorie tracking tool should allow you to specify your current body statistics anthropometrics including height, weight, age, sex, weight gain/loss, and dietary style low vs medium vs high amounts of the macronutrients: Carbs, Protein, Fat, etc. Once you’ve entered specific information, the app can typically give you a basic guideline on how to reduce weight, maintain or increase weight. Here are some of the most popular calorie tracking tools:
MyFitnessPal
Noom
Calory
Cronometer
Fat Secret
Lifesum
Myplate Calorie Counter
Lose It!
Just take an opportunity to look into what options makes the most sense in terms of free features, interface, usability/simplicity, free vs paid, dietary options, etc. I’ve personally found MyFitnessPal offers an unmatched quality with the ability to manually input food, search for food, scan bar codes, etc all while tracking your progress. One downside is it locked several important features under the paid features, limiting the overall app.
3. Self-Monitoring Health & Wellness Tracker
The third tool necessary for success is a self-monitoring health and wellness tracker. Some calorie trackers incorporate some aspects of health and wellness including weight, body fat %, etc. However, for a more comprehensive self-monitoring health and wellness tracker, I’d advise one of the following options. First, utilizing a notebook or diary to track down every important health and wellness parameter, that’ll allow for individualization to your person and current diseases that require specific tracking e.g. A1C, Blood Glucose Levels. Another option is utilizing the following self-monitoring health and wellness tracker that we use at Restore Function PT. It’ll help with weekly monitoring of some key components such as calorie count, activity level and calories burned, overall well-being, etc. Once you’ve collected weekly data, you’ll find a summary of the current readings via the weekly average table at the bottom of the Excel file. If you’re technologically savvy or have a premium membership, you can take weekly data and create trends to determine overall progress towards your goals.
Review
Creating accountability and adherence to a program can be extremely challenging. Nearly 95% of all diets fail within the first 3 years! Fad and crash diets are simply unsustainable as they tend to avoid common reasons for failure: Willpower, hunger cravings, diet fatigue, diet pressure and food addiction. Begin to simplify the process with these 3 key weight management tools. Once you become comfortable with daily use, you’ll begin to understand and interpret your general habits to more easily adjust and create lifelong change!
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