Tracking Your Weight Loss
Just decided to make a diet change? Motivated to lose weight and see significant improvements in your physical image and how you feel? Don’t delay! Making a diet change is the most effective way to improve the quality of your life. You know what they say: you are what you eat! Before you clean out your pantry and go spent $500 at Whole Foods on organic produce (you are eating organic, aren’t you?), there are some things you need to do. Tracking your progress is of utmost importance when making a diet change, and you have to start NOW.
You have to trust me on this: even though you don’t want to look the way you look right now, you HAVE to take a picture of yourself before you start your new diet. I understand that the point is to NOT be seen in pictures right now, but taking before pictures is absolutely crucial to tracking your progress in an effective manner. Not to add insult to injury, but these pictures really should be taken in your underwear, or the least amount of tight fitting clothing as you can stand.
To best document your weight loss, take five different pictures: full length frontal, full length profile, full length back, head and shoulders frontal, head and shoulders profile. These five pictures will give you an all around view of your body before you make changes to your diet. We WANT to have these pictures. Remember, nobody is going to see these but you (unless of course your results are so great you want to share before and after pictures with people to encourage them to do the same).
In addition to taking pictures to document your progress, you should also consider taking measurements of your body. The most descriptive measurement is the Waist-to-Hip Ratio (WHR), which is frequently even used by doctors instead of the Body Mass Index measurement (BMI). To calculate you WHR, measure the circumference of your waist (the smallest part of your torso between your chest and your belly button), and your hips (the largest part of your fanny). Inches and centimeters are both fine, just pick one and stay consistent with all of your measurements. Once you have these, divide your waist measurement by your hip measurement. A low risk WHR is 0.95 or lower for men, and 0.80 or lower for women. You can take additional measurements if you like, but the WHR will be the most important.
Set a goal for yourself and redo all of the above-mentioned measurements at the end of that goal. For example, let’s say all you want is to look better in a swimsuit for Spring Break in 2 weeks. That means, the day before you hop on the plane to Mexico, you hop in the same swimsuit you took your start pictures in and retake those five photographs (and the measurements, just for documentation sake). Or maybe you have a goal to reduce your waistline within a month, and you don’t care by how much. At the end of 30 days, you whip out your tape measure and see if you have lost inches around your mid-section. Retake the hip measurement and photographs as well so you are consistent.
These are not the only two methods of tracking your progress through a diet change, but can be the easiest to do and provide very clear benchmarks. Arguing with a picture is very difficult, which is why taking them before your diet change is very important. Many people get down in the dumps psychologically and cannot see the progress that is staring them in the mirror! Retaking those photographs and having clear measurements take the subjectivity out of the whole situation and let you see the forest for the trees (or your feet for the first time in a year).
