The Right Way To Track Your Weight Loss Progress

The Quick Cut:

• To get a real picture of your progress, you have to measure it, properly.
  

• Don’t just track your weight, but also take photos, measure body fat, and track workouts.
  

• To really step up your game, track calories and macros so you can hit your exact targets each day; this makes reaching your fitness and fat loss goals inevitable!

The Long Slice:

Management guru Peter Drucker said, "If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it."

He was referring to business, but this concept is just as relevant to achieving your fitness or fat loss goals.

Tracking helps give us a true reading of how things are going.

A big benefit of tracking, is that it can bring to light the progress you're making, and progress, no matter how small, can be very motivating!

Aspects Of Your Fat Loss Progress To Track

Some basic metrics you want to keep track of include:

• Weekly: Your body weight, preferably with a digital scale.

• Bi-Weekly: Your body fat percentage, preferably with calipers, but if your scale measures BF that’s OK too.

• Daily: The amount of weight, sets, and reps you’re doing during your resistance training workouts. You can track this with your phone or in a small notebook; you want these numbers to be going up almost every week.

What you want to do is get a baseline and then track the changes in these metrics to see if you’re progressing.

In addition, you want to take body photos and see how your body is transforming week to week.

Another 'soft' measure of your progress is to notice how well your clothes are fitting you. Able to get back into your skinny jeans? That's a good sign.

What To Do If Your Fat Loss Is Not Progressing Fast Enough

It's nice to track, have data, etc., but what do you do if you are tracking these items regularly and you're not making the kind of fat loss progress you'd like?

First, quite simply, be patient. Coming from a place of patience instead of beating yourself up, will go a long way towards reducing stress, increasing happiness, and improving your chances of losing the weight you'd like to lose.

Second, stop comparing yourself to others, including the 'old you'. Your journey is unique and there are many factors that will go into you successfully losing fat (even if it may have been easier in the past).

Third, diagnose your weight loss plateau by looking at the four big areas: Nutrition, Fitness, Sleep, and Stress.

Finally, and possibly most importantly, if you want to really see results fast and fool-proof, track your macros and calories throughout the day with a tool like MyFitnessPal. This is more advanced and can get tedious, but it is the single most powerful practice for getting to and maintaining your ideal weight. 

Tracking your success through the various means above will help you properly measure it, and what you can measure, you can improve.