Maintaining a positive health and fitness routine is incredibly difficult and so many people struggle with motivation. It’s easy to exercise regularly and eat well for the first few weeks but then people start falling behind with it. This is often because they don’t feel like anything is changing and they worry that whatever they are doing is not making them healthier.
In most cases, you just don’t notice the changes because they are gradual. People often make the mistake of weighing themselves and basing all of their assumptions on that one number. The thing is, depending on the workout you do, you might not lose weight because you are building muscle at the same time as losing fat. It’s also important to remember that losing weight isn’t the only reason to eat well and exercise more. It boosts your mental health and energy levels, improves heart health, and reduces your risk of all sorts of health problems. So, you should be looking for alternative ways to measure your progress.
If you want to boost your motivation and track the effectiveness of your health and fitness routine without weighing yourself, these are the best ways to tell if it is working or not.
You Are Making Health A Priority
Although tracking your routine in a more tangible way is important (and we’ll come to that later) you should also think about whether it is a priority or not. If you find that you are making health a priority and increasingly making good choices about what you eat or whether you skip a workout to do something else, that’s a great sign. Learning how to prioritize health in all areas of life is the first step to creating a positive routine. Once you notice yourself doing that, you know that you are on the right track. If you don’t think that you are prioritizing it, don’t be too hard on yourself about that. We all need a little time to adjust to a new routine, just keep trying and make an effort to put your health first.
You’re Burning More Calories
The easiest measure of how well you are doing with an exercise routine is the number of calories you burn. Every time you exercise and your heart rate goes up, you burn calories, and the harder you work, the more calories you will burn. You can find some great online calculators to give you an estimate of how many calories you are burning, or you could invest in an exercise tracker that will measure your heart rate. By tracking the calories that you burn with each workout, you have a clear indication of how hard you have worked. When you see that number steadily increasing week by week, it gives you that motivation boost you need to keep going.
You Have More Energy
Improved energy levels are one of the biggest benefits of a regular exercise routine and a better diet. When you eat a diet of sugary foods that don’t have much nutritional value, your body is starved of the goodness it needs, and that has a big impact on energy. Sugar also causes you to have an energy spike before a big crash, making you feel tired for the rest of the day. But when you start eating a diet of fresh fruits and vegetables packed full of nutrition, you’ll notice a massive difference.
Exercise boosts your energy too. Your energy levels are tied to the number of mitochondria your body produces and when you are active, it produces more. It assumes that you need more energy because you are moving around more, so it gets into the habit of generating more mitochondria to keep up with you. That means that you will notice a consistent boost to your energy levels.
If you are concerned about whether your diet and exercise routine is working or not, think about how you feel. Do you have more energy than you used to? If so, you’re moving in the right direction.
You Don’t Crave Unhealthy Food
Everybody craves unhealthy food when they first start a new diet. A lot of people don’t realize it but sugar is incredibly addictive, so it’s no surprise that you start to crave it when you cut down or cut it out completely. But as time goes on, if you are able to ignore those cravings, they will start to become less frequent until they disappear altogether.
There is also a mental element to this because you will notice other positive changes to your body and your energy levels, and you will associate that with the improved diet. So, as time goes on, you don’t crave unhealthy food because you don’t want to ruin the amazing progress you have made.
You’re Happier
This is probably the most important thing to consider with any lifestyle change. If something makes you happier, it’s working and you’re moving in the right direction. A lot of people start a diet and exercise routine because they want to get physically healthier but it’s the mental benefits that really surprise them.
It’s well documented that exercising releases endorphins and reduces stress hormones, so it has a very positive impact on feelings of anxiety and depression. Diet also has a role to play in these mental health issues, so many people find that they are generally much happier when they start a new health regime.
Self-esteem also has a big part to play in this. When people start looking and feeling healthier, they get a big confidence boost. That means they engage with life more and they stop letting low self-esteem hold them back. If you notice that you feel better about yourself and you are more confident, that’s a great sign.
Weighing yourself can give you an indication of how your health regime is going. If you are aiming to lose weight and you have lost weight, that’s great. But it’s not the best way to measure your success and it’s all too easy for people to have an unhealthy relationship with the weighing scales, so you should use these methods instead.
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