Habit Tracking: Your Secret Weapon in Weight Management

When you’re overweight, you have too much fat on your body. The fat doesn’t serve a purpose. It doesn’t protect you. It doesn’t even feed you (unless you’re being starved). Excess fat creates inflammation, which increases your risk for life-threatening conditions and events, including diabetes, heart attack, and stroke.

Even though it’s common knowledge that obesity and being overweight are health risks, we’re fatter and unhealthier than ever. Obesity in adults around the world doubled from 1990 to 2022. It quadrupled in adolescents during the same time period.

But with all of the different dietary and exercise approaches out there, how do you know which one to try? And how do you know if it’s working? 

Weight management is a multipronged venture that takes planning and dedication — and a lot of support. It also benefits from tools. One such tool is habit tracking.

Jennie Barker, FNP, our medical experts at Gorman Medical, PC, want to help you attain and maintain a healthy weight for life. That means changing some key habits and developing new ones. We recommend habit tracking as part of our supportive weight management program at our offices in Colorado Springs and Cripple Creek, Colorado.

How do you habit track, and how does it help you manage your weight? Below is a brief rundown.

You can forget about ‘diets’

When you enroll in weight management, we don’t put you on an unsustainable calorie-deficient diet just so you can shed a lot of pounds at once. Instead, we help you make changes and choices that alter your approach to food, movement, and health. We may also give you medications that accelerate an initial weight loss, short-term.

A habit-tracking app lays out your goals in a simple way. You identify new habits you want to adopt, and then keep track of how often you perform them. You also identify the bad habits you need to wean yourself from in order to have a healthy, sustainable lifestyle, including a stable weight.

You get to check off your good habits

A “to-do” list is satisfying because you get to cross out each task as you accomplish it. Not only do you know that you’ve performed that task, the act of striking out is a reward in itself. Maybe you want to add some new habits, such as:

• Eating more fruits and vegetables
• Drinking more water and health beverages
• Getting high-quality protein
• Moving every 30 minutes or so

One of the reasons this approach works is that it’s broken your big goal of permanent weight loss into smaller, more achievable goals. You clearly see that you’ve already started making improvements to your lifestyle that may have once seemed impossible. 

You break bad habits

Successful weight loss isn’t about a successful diet. It’s about making and breaking habits, good and bad. A habit tracker also lets you see your progress as you ditch habits that added to your weight gain, such as:

• Eating while watching TV
• Snacking throughout the day
• Reaching for sugary treats
• Drinking alcohol
• Sitting for hours instead of taking movement breaks

When you catch yourself in the middle of a bad habit, you get to switch gears and check it off as something you haven’t done … and shouldn’t!

You celebrate non-scale victories

Most of the time, when you set out to lose weight, you have “scale” victories in mind: Lose 10 pounds. Or 50. Or 150. Or, maybe you have measuring-tape goals, such as trim 4 inches from your waist.

Again, those are the large goals. They can seem just outside your grasp, like Tantalus reaching for fruit that always eludes him. 

But non-scale victories are like little stepping stones on the way to your larger goals. By tracking your habits you get to celebrate each of them, which gives you a little mood boost and motivation to keep going to the next stepping stone. 

You don’t have to track it alone

Although it’s possible to download habit trackers from the App Store or online, you may find it difficult to develop the new habit of habit tracking alone (without another habit tracker?). That’s why we recommend medically supported weight-loss management.

We help you find the best new habits to adopt and identify the bad habits you’d like to break. We also work with you to design a customized eating and exercise plan that takes into consideration your preferences, current status, and goals.

Are you ready to change your habits, weight, and health with habit tracking and weight loss management? Call our nearest office or use the online form to schedule a weight-loss consultation today.