In last week’s origin story we talked about some of the basics of the program, since then the topic of tracking has come up a couple of times so I decided this week’s post should be delving deeper into the concept of tracking, what it is, why I do it & some of the things I’ve learned from it.
The most common thing people track is food. It’s the most common because it’s essential to the program. How can you know if you have enough daily points left to have that second helping of potatoes or a bowl of ice cream if you’re not tracking what you eat during the day? Now there are a couple of strategies to tracking, the one that I’ve found the most helpful is that I track my food as soon as I’m eating it. Some people try to do it at the end of the day. I don’t like that because what happens if I don’t remember something I ate. Others try to track at the start of the day, as soon as they get going in the morning they track everything they expect to eat for the day. Again, I don’t like this because there are too many assumptions about what you will eat that day. What if you’re busy and just have a piece of fruit for lunch instead of the whole meal. What if I’m not satisfied and I have an extra snack?
Most people will track their food & that’s it. The program works if that’s all you do, but with a little extra detail you can learn a lot more about your body. Here’s a list of some of the other things I track: what time I eat, my over-all mood for the day, any major events or happenings during the day. Why so many details? I’ll break them down one at a time. I track when I eat because when I look back at it, I can see if I have a doughnut for breakfast its harder to stay on track, but if I have an egg sandwich for breakfast I’m satisfied all the way through lunch. Also, it helps me identify trigger foods: foods that trigger cravings and make it tempting to over eat. The second thing I track is my mood. I do this so when I look back at my week I can see that if my results weren’t the best that week was it because I was stressed all week or maybe I had a great week but I felt blue all week. Just learning about how my body reacts to things. Lastly, I track major events for mostly the same reason that I track my mood. As I look back at my results over the last 2 years I can see a pattern of how my body reacts to stress or when I’m sick. I can also see that I struggle at certain points of the year.
That’s a very quick explanation but like most things in my life, it was a process that I’ve learned and refined over time. I started off just tracking one meal a week, then built my routine to every meal, then I added any snacks, then I started to add some of the other aspects of my life from day to day and it’s been beneficial not just with my weight loss journey but to learn about myself, my personality, my demeanor & how I react and respond to things around me.