Tracking Your Trends

Tracking what you eat, what your activity levels are, how much water you drink and how much sleep you get along with some important numbers like weight, blood glucose levels, and overall body fat composition are more important that you may think if you are trying to lose weight.

Prior to the start of the new year I decided to enjoy lunch at a favorite lunch place, Sweet Tomatoes. For those living in areas where this chain does not reach, they are essentially a soup and salad restaurant. They have an amazing broccoli salad that I can eat plate fulls of (and I really don't like broccoli that much).

While there I try to avoid the Asian Salad because I know those fried wanton strips and chicken with Soy Sauce are just terrible for me. So I stick with the broccoli salad, a little Caesar Salad, mixed greens and fresh baby spinach. Sounds healthy right?

Well, thanks to my food log I was able to identify that each time I went to this restaurant I gained a good four pounds of weight the next day.

Another trend I have noticed is that the more sleep I get (ugh) the more weight I tend to lose. A good percentage of that is just added water weight that one loses at night, but not all of it. The body needs down time to repair itself and I'm learning that my normal four hours of sleep just are not enough for that process to fully complete.

And speaking of water weight...it seems counter intuitive to me that drinking more water will help you lose weight but the fact is it does. I've been told that a good way to estimate how much water you need to drink is to take 50 percent of your weight to get the number of ounces of water you should drink daily. So at 200 pounds I need to drink 100 ounces of water. That is nearly two gallons of water a day! It is important to note that drinking that much water should be done over the course of the entire day and not all at once or you risk messing up your electrolytes and could cause severe medical injury, even death.

So what have I learned? It is important to track what you eat and drink and watch your activity levels and amount of sleep and then correlate that information with weight loss/gain to improve success or avoid future failure.