Tracking Progress Beyond the Scale

If you are on a personal health journey, tracking progress can be very important. why? First off, you can more easily gauge if you are headed in the right direction, you can reflect on what has worked for you and what didn't, and it can be motivating to see your goals slowly come towards completion! But progress is so much more than the number on the scale.

Whether your journey is weight loss or not, it can be easy to get caught up in the numbers. As silly as it sounds some may even go so far to say they find difficulty separating their worth from the numbers on the scale. Monitoring our weight can be a determining factor of our health and can be used as an important tool, but for those who find themselves with an emotional response towards the scale it may not be best to take that approach. The scale can often bring more harm than good and lower ones self-esteem. I hope there comes a time when the scale will be used strictly as a tool for professionals to better health, but for now society uses the scale degradingly and ropes in our emotions, so lets find a more efficient but gentle ways to track our progress.

There are a number of other ways we can track progress. If your goal is weight loss, or improving skin issues, resolving hair loss etc., progress pictures may be a great place to start. When considering weight loss, often times we can see a physical difference before seeing a significant weight drop (as total fat and muscle percentages begin to change). We may not be able to tell the difference by looking at ourselves in the mirror day by day but logging photos can prove progress is taking place right before our eyes! They do not have to be shared anywhere, they can be done completely in privately as reminder to keep going.

If this still invokes negative emotions/reactions within us, try looking inwards. I have always enjoyed journaling and it can be a great way to log progress as it is something we can always glance back at. I suggest writing down how you are feeling each day. What is your mood today, and what is something you did to feel this way? What is one noticeable step you took today to contribute to reaching your goal? Asking questions such as these can be very therapeutic and can not only show us what is working but also what's not working. Through accurate journaling we may even be able to pin point what might be making us plato or loose progress.

My last suggestion is to retry old skills and see if you have improved. For example, if you are trying to grow in strength, complete a hard workout. Write down your total time or the amount of weight you could lift, how fast you could run etc., then months or even just a couple weeks later repeat that same activity or workout and see you improvements! Update that current progress from the last and go from there repeating the process. You are likely a lot stronger than you think! This can be done for non fitness/sports related goals as well. For example, maybe you are trying to read more for self improvement, each month keep a log of how many pages or books you read. Complete this in the months to follow and no doubt it will be the push you need to keep reaching for your goals!

In conclusion attenable yet challenging goals will become a lot more easily completed by tracking progress. The advice above is not only what has worked for me but is also suggestions I have frequently given my clients to help them reach what they individually set out to achieve . I sincerely hope you give goal tracking a try and maybe even ditch your scale for a while!

In Wellness,

Jill Jackson, CNP, NNCP