Benefits to Logging Diet, Exercise
This time of year most individuals and families are very busy with their every day lives, especially during the holiday season. A great way to keep you and your family on track with diet and exercise is to keep a log. Logging diet and exercise can benefit you in a few different ways:
- Prevent over/under eating: By keeping a log of the foods you are taking in, you will get a visual of your daily nutrients. By seeing the foods and calories on paper, you can better delegate if you have not eaten enough for the day or if you have taken in more calories than you should have.
- Meal planning: By logging and planning your meals ahead of time you can have a more organized eating schedule. This type of planning before the work week begins can help to prevent eating unhealthy processed foods, or fast food trips.
- Motivation: Logging your meals and exercise can help to motivate you to eat healthy and exercise more often. If you log not working out or bad eating habits for multiple days each week, this can help you see that you may to need to step it up the following week, by taking in more nutritious foods, logging more workouts.
- Goal Stetting: Logging a fitness or diet goal each week will keep you on track with your healthy habits. Example goals may be "eat a fruit and veggie every day this week" or "progress to a light jog for 5 minutes during weekly walk."
- Record Achievements: Once you have been logging your fitness and nutrition habits for a few weeks or months you can look back and see where you began to where you are now. In the beginning you may have only been able to do 15 minutes of cardio and are now up to 30 minutes, or you may have snacked on unhealthy foods like chips and cookies but have now replaced them with fruits and veggies.
mau
4:10 pm on Friday, November 30, 2012
Diets where I log and obsess, have been a complete failure for me. This time I started out cutting everything I eat in half. I didn't give anything up. I drastically cut back on sugar and any foods that your body turns to sugar. But I did not give up sweet desserts. Turns out some of these changes have had quite an impact on my psoriasis as it has cleared up considerably. I have found my psoriasis has an aversion to tomatoes, citrus and other acids. Avoiding these has caused me to avoid many foods such as pizza which is addictive for me.
I have had greater success losing weight this way than dieting.
Physical Enhancement Services
1:01 pm on Sunday, December 2, 2012
Thank you for leaving your comment on our blog. I very happy for your success with your "diet". While we agree that some people may get compulsive to keeping a diet log, we use the log for diet and exercise very often with great success. But the difference is learning how to use the log. To just write down your intake and exercise leads to no results. To use the log to notice trends in good and bad food consumption, "junk food crave" and what circumstances may be causing the falling off the wagon. In a similar scenario, we have people fill out a log when they see us for pain or lack of function. It helps us to determine under what circumstances a person is mostly affected so we can better suggest adjustments and change of treatment. I totally agree with you that keeping a log just to keep a log does not make a diet successful, it is the adjustments that you make along the way that help progress.
Just a small additional note: In a sense you are on a diet. By cutting everything in half, watching the sweets and desserts, cutting tomatoes, you have created a diet that works for you...and that is the most important diet you can do!
I am glad the lack of tomatoes have had a positive affect on your psoriasis. Tomatoes have both citric and sulfuric acids which directly affect the dehydration of the sweat glands of the skin. This is can cause the escalation of psoriasis. Good luck with the continued relief!
mau
2:00 pm on Monday, December 3, 2012
You are correct I really am on a diet but not in the sense where I feel deprived. There are times I stray and eat the things I know cause me problems. I have learned to drink tons of water after to flush it out of my system. This helps to suppress the after effects.
Thank you for the explanation as to why the acid has an impact on my psoriasis. I always like to know why these food items have such an impact on me. I have also added an Evening Primrose Oil supplement to my daily routine. I have had extremely dry skin, even while using lotions, since I was diagnosed with it. It will be interesting in January whether I will be able to control the winter dryness more effectively.
My dermatologist also recommended trying to avoid pork as there are indications it affects psoriasis and the related arthritis which I have.
CTCMom2009
9:11 am on Monday, December 3, 2012
Everyone is different... I actually do benefit from keeping a log of my food/exercise and it has helped me tremendously. That isn't to say that I consider myself 'dieting'... I have made a lifestyle change in order to lose weight and be healthy. My 3 yr old son has also developed good habits where he'd rather have a cucumber with a little ranch dressing to dip in, rather than cookies! I'm down 32 lbs from my pre-pregnancy weight and 50 lbs from my post-pregnancy weight!
Physical Enhancement Services
9:28 am on Monday, December 3, 2012
That is awesome! Congratulations!