Many people seriously lack motivation to lose the weight they need. They are unable to set realistic goals or they just cannot see their own bad habits long enough to break them. Journaling your weight loss journey really helps you to see where you’ve been and where you’re going.
Why Journaling?
There are several reasons to keep a chronicle of your weight loss endeavors. First of all, it helps you to realistically see where you’re at. Writing down your weight means you have to acknowledge it. Keeping track of what you eat means that you have to see on paper how many little bites of this or that you take during the day. All of the sudden, it doesn’t appear like you’re eating just a little this or a little that but you realize that you’ve been nibbling on sweet stuff all day long.
Motivation
Sometimes writing out on paper that you lack motivation is enough to make you buckle down and do it anyways. There’s something cathartic about getting to gripe about how rough a diet is and let’s face it–not that many friends are going to listen to us complain about our diets for weeks on end. A journal is also a convenient place to keep ‘before’ and after ‘photos’. If you seriously want to be motivated, take a look at the ‘before’ pictures. By taking pictures every so often to see how far you’ve come, you can keep yourself motivated to keep going.
Setting Realistic Goals
You may start journaling and realizing that your whole lifestyle is completely unhealthy. Perhaps you never exercise, eat only Mc Donald’s and try to sit as much as possible! Writing it out has a way of making you feel guilty (but this is a good guilt) about the lifestyle you live and it also can help you see where you need to improve. Maybe your goal is 30 minutes of exercise a day. . .but seeing that you did none yesterday may help you to set a goal of 5 minutes a day for tomorrow.
Check out my next blog on how to set up your own weight loss journal!
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