When you’re determined to meet your fitness goals, it’s crucial to find ways to stay on track. And one of the best ways to achieve weight loss success is to track your progress.

Losing that extra weight, dieting, doing exercise, and living right is no walk in the park.

You often fall into the temptation to do a little less on each workout or skip workouts altogether.

How tracking your progress can help you achieve fat loss? Well, it may seem basic, but tracking your progress provides an excellent way to view periodic changes and hold yourself accountable.

It all starts with having a plan that allows you to find and stay on the right path.

Track Your Weight

Each day, you look at yourself and get used to what you look like, often overlooking minor changes that escalate into considerable transformations in the long run.

Track your body weight accurately by getting a good body scale.

Weigh yourself at least twice a day as you’re likely to get varying readings of your body weight at different times of the day.

Average daily weight measurements and use them to calculate weekly averages. Daily and weekly averages provide you with a near accurate idea of your actual weight so you can see the overall long-term progress.

Periodic fluctuations in your weight, and decline over time, helps to keep you motivated.

Other ways to track your physical progress are to take photos and measure your body fat percentage.

When taking photos, it helps to use the same camera, lighting, angle, time of day, and pose to capture the difference. Being able to see changes month to month can be a huge motivational factor as well.

When measuring your body fat percentage, you may opt to use a fat loss monitor or record circumference (girth) measurements.

A loss of inches in circumference usually represents a loss in body fat.

A body composition test also measures how much of your weight is fat and lean mass.

Increasing your lean mass increases the number of calories you burn each day, making it easier to shed excess fat.

Keep A Weight Loss Journal

When many people start their weight loss journey, they don’t know how to keep a weight loss journal or even the importance. To keep a weight loss journal is one of the most important steps in your weight loss.

Your journal will keep you motivated, help you keep track of your food and activities, and it is just fun to keep track of your results.

Now I’ll tell you how to keep a weight loss journal. It’s pretty easy and really up to you on what you should put in it. I suggest tracking your weight every week in your weight loss journal.

You should follow your food and exercise daily as well as your thoughts and feelings for the day. Keeping track of what foods and activities make you feel best will help you in your weight loss journal.

Free places to find weight loss journals:

• FitDay – a Free online weight loss journal
• MyFitnessPal – a free online weight loss journal with a community for support
• Lose It! – a weight loss tool with many helpful tools to help you count calories and gain support

You can also blog about your weight loss, as many people do, instead of wondering how to keep a weight loss journal at home. You can do a private blog on Blogger or WordPress for free.

You can also make the blog public and share your journey with the world. It’s really up to you and your personal preference.

Now you have the basics on how to keep a weight loss journal with some free resources. You have no excuses to put off your weight loss journey.

Track Your Food Choices

Your nutrition and diet have a huge role to play in the composition of your body.

If you’re trying to burn excess body fat, your training routine and diet are crucial.

Whenever you find yourself putting in so much effort into your training but it’s not yielding any positive results, it’s a sign that you should start keeping a food diary.

A food diary helps you to keep a log of what and how much you eat.

After tracking your food intake for, say, a week, take a look back and see if there’s any room for adjustment.

Having a record of your food intake makes it easier to look back and make necessary changes for successful weight loss.

Keep A Workout Log

Be sure to have a workout plan and keep track of your workouts.

For weight loss training, try to track the exercise and duration, speed level/distance traveled, and workout intensity.

Moreover, the more you work out, the more it becomes challenging to track the weights you used and the number of repetitions you completed each set.

Tracking your workouts gives you a good assessment of your workout plan. Not to mention an opportunity to tweak your training regimen and challenge yourself to achieve your weight loss goals.

In addition to allowing you to dig into the details of your training program, keeping a training log also allows you to focus.

Bottom Line

Please understand – you don’t have to track everything on a day-to-day basis!

The human body is very complex. Your weight can fluctuate over a day, so consider gauging your progress by looking at data over, say, an entire month.

Rather than focusing on daily fluctuations, analyze the trend over four weeks.

While having as much information as possible is desirable, avoid adding too much data as you may eventually get overwhelmed with detail.

Successful weight loss does not happen overnight. It takes hard work, dedication, and patience.

Make a concrete plan, track your progress and adjust your goals accordingly.

I hope you found this helpful and will start implementing these strategies to see that scale go down. ?