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Every year, nearly 50 million Americans go on a diet. While there always seems to be a new diet trend, the only proven way to lose weight and keep it off is with a long-term lifestyle change. The key to successfully managing your weight requires you to eat healthier food, control your portion size, and get regular physical activity. In order to lose weight, you need to consume fewer calories than your body burns, which will cause your body to burn stored fat for energy. You can achieve this by eating less (caloric restriction) or by exercising more to burn more calories. Often times, people get the best results by doing both, a modest decrease in calories combined with increased exercise and fitness. You can also increase the amount of energy your body burns throughout the day by increasing your muscle mass. Every pound of muscle increases your daily caloric burn rate by about 6 calories.
Incorporating healthy eating habits and more physical exercise usually involves making some changes in your lifestyle. You might need to dine out less, change where you shop, avoid certain foods, take the stairs at work, take walks on your lunch break, and other small changes that cumulatively make enough changes to get your weight under control. We believe that getting the right information about what you need to change is the best place to start: good health starts with good decisions. Start by logging the foods you eat, your exercise routines, your body measurements, and some of the other basic parts of healthy living. Once you are armed with this information, you can start targeting specific, achievable areas for improvement, like reducing your intake of fat or cutting back on dining out to once a week.
HealtheHuman provides a number of tools to help you lose weight and keep it off. First of all, HealtheHuman provides a set of tools to help you track your daily routines, like your diet, exercise, medications, and more. Understanding your current lifestyle and habits can be eye-opening, helping you focus on the areas you need to change to achieve the weight and physique you want. Once you’ve decided what to change, HealtheHuman helps you set goals, track your progress to reaching the goals, and provides a set of charting and reporting tools that make it easy to analyze your information or share it with a personal trainer, dietitian, or doctor. Once you’ve met your weight loss goals, HealtheHuman helps you keep it off by giving you the tools to keep track of your measurements, diet, activity level, and other habits that will help you maintain your healthy weight.
Key Health Information to Track for Weight Loss
Before starting any diet or exercise plan, you should discuss it with your doctor. There are a number of health conditions that can be aggravated or complicated by changes in your diet or activity levels, so it is highly recommended that you discuss your plans with your physician. Make sure to provide any of your health advisors helping you reach your weight loss goals with a comprehensive health history, including any medications or supplements you are taking, especially those you are introducing specifically for weight loss. Supplements, over-the-counter medications, prescriptions, and changes in your diet can cause side-effects or interfere with an existing medication, so make sure to provide your physicians with a complete history. The Medication Tracker and Supplement Tracker in HealtheHuman can help you keep detailed records of all your medications, vitamins, and supplements that can easily be shared with your doctor using the built-in reporting and charting features.
Body measurements are an important reality check when you start your weight loss plan, but they can also be motivators as you make progress. It is important not to get fixated on one measurement, like your overall weight because it often takes time for weight to be affected by a diet and exercise routine. By taking other measurements, such as BMI, waist, thigh, hip, neck, and other body measurements, you can see progress across different areas of your body. Even small changes can help provide the motivation you need to stick with your diet. HealtheHuman includes a Body Measurement Tracker that helps you log all of your essential body measurements, including your weight. The tracker also calculates your Body Mass Index (BMI), Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), Waist-to-Hip Ratio (WHR), and Waist-to-Height (WTHR). Quickly build charts of your progress for each measurement, set improvement goals, or create reports of all your readings to share with your trainer or doctor. If you have a body composition scale, HealtheHuman also includes a tracker to help you keep track of all those readings as well.
While losing weight might be the end goal, achieving a healthy body composition is an important part of both achieving and maintaining your ideal weight. Most body composition scales measure your weight, total body fat percentage, total body water percentage, total bone mass weight, total muscle weight, and visceral fat weight. Some advanced models include additional measurements or calculations, such as segmental measurements (including arm or leg muscle mass), Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), Daily Caloric Intake (DCI) recommendations, and more. By focusing on a number of different measurements, you begin looking at your overall health and fitness, not just your weight. For example, if didn’t lose any weight but your muscle mass increased by 2 pounds, you’ve made positive progress. Muscle weighs more than fat and the more muscle you have, the more calories you burn throughout the day. Without monitoring more than your weight, you might get discouraged by not seeing your weight drop, when you have really made great progress towards your weight loss goals. The Body Composition Tracker in HealtheHuman helps you track, chart, analyze, report, and set goals on all of your body composition scale readings.
Controlling your consumption of calories is an essential part of losing weight and keeping it off. This starts with healthy eating and portion control, which helps you better control exactly how many calories are in the foods you eat. One of the first steps in managing your weight is to ensure you are eating within your daily caloric allowance, meaning you consume no more than the number of calories burned by your body each day. You can then make small changes to remove calories from your daily diet to start reducing your total calorie consumption. The Diet Tracker provides a comprehensive daily food log including a database of over 40,000 foods. Log all of your foods and beverages, by meal, throughout the day. Built in analysis tools show your progress, calculate your recommended daily allowances, tally your nutrition totals, including total calories and calories by meal. Chart your nutrition levels by day and build detailed reports of your diet to share with your dietitian, personal trainer, or doctor.
Tracking your total calories in a meal is important, but the amount of sugar and fat is also very important. Keeping a log of your daily sugar and fat levels can help ensure you are eating the right foods. Staying within your total daily calories but consuming double the recommended amounts of sugar or fat is not healthy, and can affect your weight loss goals. HealtheHuman’s Diet Tracker logs your calories, fat, sugar, fiber, carbohydrates, sodium, cholesterol, protein, and water for each meal and total for the day. You can set daily goals and goals by meal to help limit your intake of calories, sugar, carbohydrates, fat, and more. Powerful charting tools and extensive reports make it easy to analyze your diet and nutrition to help you eat better.
Many people have come to expect that being on a diet means feeling hungry, but avoiding feelings of hunger is important. Hunger is a biological response, triggering the release of hormones that motivate you to eat. When you eat, your body releases a hormone called leptin. After hours of not eating, leptin levels decrease and the body releases a hormone called ghrelin, which triggers the feelings of hunger. The longer you go without eating, the higher your levels of ghrelin, increasing your desire to eat and potentially weakening your willpower to stick to your diet. You can try eating more frequent, low calories, high-fiber meals throughout the day to suppress these feelings of hunger. The Symptom Tracker and Quicktag Tracker features can help you monitor feelings of hunger throughout the day, helping you make changes in your diet and lifestyle to help you counteract these diet-sabotaging feelings.
Fiber is an important part of healthy eating. Whole foods that are high in fiber increase your feeling of satiation after a meal, making you feel full faster and longer. Many people do not get enough fiber in their diet, which often leads to more snacking and bigger portions during meals. Increasing your fiber with low-calorie whole foods like apples, broccoli, blueberries, chia seeds, and black beans can help keep you feeling full, reduce your calories, and help keep your digestive system working well. Fiber can also slow down the body’s absorption of fat, which can help reduce the amount of fat absorbed from your diet. The Diet Tracker helps you track the fiber in all your foods, including creating total fiber amounts by meal and for the day.
Losing weight takes patience and dedication. It is important to have realistic expectations on your progress and to set small, achievable goals that incrementally will help you reach your desired weight. Make sure to start with near term, achievable goals that aren’t only about your weight. Add goals like trying to walk 10,000 steps a day for 2 weeks straight, or adding 2 pounds of muscle this month, or only eating your daily allowance of calories, fat, and sugar for the next week. Setting goals that are achieved in a short period of time helps keep you more accountable and motivated, rather than focusing on something that is weeks, months, or even years away. The Body Measurement Tracker and other daily trackers in HealtheHuman include a goal tracking feature as well as powerful charting and reporting tools. Tracking your daily readings and seeing your progress to a goal can be an excellent motivator.
For many of us, we use food to help cope with our feelings or stress levels. It is important to recognize your emotional eating habits if you are trying to lose weight. It can be helpful to track your moods and pay attention during times of high emotion or stress. The Mood Tracker and Stress Tracker help you track how you are feeling throughout the day. Knowing when you have peaks in your mood can help you introduce healthy coping mechanisms or habits to prevent emotional eating. Maybe you can plan an afternoon walk right after your most stressful part of the day, using exercise and being outdoors to help you get through the hard parts of your day without food. You can use the charting and analysis tools in HealtheHuman to compare your mood and stress levels with your eating habits to see if emotional eating is making weight management harder.
Your feelings can have a significant impact on the success or failure of your diet. Dieting requires will power and commitment to changes in what you eat, your activity levels, and your lifestyle. Negative emotions can become very discouraging and make it harder to stay motivated. Feeling deprived, angry, irritable, sadness, or hopelessness can increase your chances of failure. Low blood sugar can also impact moods, so going hours without eating also increases your negative emotions. HealtheHuman includes a Mood Tracker to help you record your moods throughout the day. If you are aware of negative feelings, you can make changes in your diet or exercise routines to help control or avoid them.
Regular exercise and activity will increase your weight loss and help to maintain a healthy weight. Any level of activity and exercise is better than none, so if you can’t run, try walking. If you have trouble walking, try riding a bicycle. If those don’t work, try swimming, or lifting weights or sports or anything else that increases your heart rate and works your muscles. With the Exercise Tracker, you can keep track of all your workouts, exercises, and other daily activities. You can estimate your total calories burned for each exercise, including total calories burned for the day. Integrated goals, charting, and reporting provide you all the tools you need to stay motivated and active.
Building up your muscle tone can help accelerate your weight loss goals and boost your metabolism. Adding in more weight resistance exercises like weight lifting will increase your muscle mass. With a body composition scale, you can measure your total muscle mass and track your progress over time. The Exercise Tracker will help you track your strength training time and exercises throughout the day.
A good night’s sleep is very important to your health, especially when you are trying to lose weight. Studies have shown that when you do not get enough sleep, your levels of leptin are lower which means lower levels of the hormone that suppresses feelings of hunger, resulting in increased appetites. Often times, not getting enough sleep causes an increased craving for carbohydrates and sugar. Many people also confuse low energy levels with feelings of hunger, so they mistakenly think they need more foods because they are tired, when the root cause is actually poor or insufficient sleep. The Sleep Tracker in HealtheHuman helps you keep track of your sleep habits and quality. Identifying and correcting sleeping problems can help improve your cravings and energy levels.
For many of us, eating is emotional. Keeping a journal of your feelings, especially when you are tempted to break from your diet, can help you express those emotions without eating. Often times, writing about our feelings helps us cope with them, acknowledge the cravings, and muster up the will power to work through it. The Journal feature in HealtheHuman helps you keep a private daily diary of all your feelings and experiences.
Other Things You Can Do to Help Manage Weight Loss
While it is important to track your progress on your diet, one of the benefits of logging all of this information is to create more effective and meaningful visits with your doctors, specialists, and other health advisors. Maintaining regular appointments with your treating physicians and specialists can help you stay on course and achieve your long-term weight loss goals. It is important to keep your appointments with your doctor and to provide as much detail as possible to make their treatments, recommendations, and prescriptions effective.
Healthy eating can be challenging, especially for those of us who grew up on a diet of fried, high-fat, and packaged foods. Learning how to cook whole foods, prepare well rounded meals, read labels, and eat healthy can be difficult. Consulting with a dietitian can provide valuable information and a plan to get you eating the right foods to help you lower your calories, increase your fiber, control your hunger, and reach you weight loss goals. Talk to your doctor about dietitians in your area or within your health plan.
Motivation is an important part of sticking with a diet. Avoid things that hinder or interfere with your motivation levels. Avoid spending too much time doing sedentary activities, like watching television or using the computer. Try adding in lifestyle changes that will disrupt these prolonged periods of inactivity like taking a walk, doing house chores, or any other activity that keeps you moving and does not involve food. Sometimes people can affect your motivation, both positive and negative. It is important to acknowledge the impact that the people in your life can have on your motivation and to surround yourself with as much positive support as possible.
Exercise is always easier with a buddy to keep you motivated. Find someone to exercise with, play sports, take walks, or anything else that gets you active.
Medical Disclaimer: All information on this site is of a general nature and is furnished for your knowledge and understanding only. This information is not to be taken as medical or other health advice pertaining to your specific health and medical condition.
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