Here we are enjoying the frosty grass whilst we let the chickens out this midnight, but I digress 😂

Today I went for a 50 minute walk pushing the buggy. It’s a walk that I do very regularly. I’ve had my activity tracker for 3 weeks now and I know it’s almost 5,000 steps, however when I’m pushing the buggy it doesn’t pick up all of my steps (today it says 1,700 for the walk). Initially this frustrated me as I’ve set a step target for the day which I wasn’t hitting despite long buggy walks! I’ve now realised I can put it in the log as an ‘activity’ session so at least it’s counting in some way. I love the way my tracker also looks at how many flights of stairs I’ve done as even when I’m not able to reach my step target I can go up and down the stairs a few extra times and hit this target 🎯😀

It got me thinking about the importance of monitoring progress in several different ways. For example if you’re trying to loose weight and only watch the scales then you’re only getting part of the story. If you’re exercising more and gaining the metabolically active muscle tissue (which is a good thing and will up the amount of energy you’re using for staying still e.g. when you’re sleeping) it’s important to monitor how you’re doing by watching other things like how your clothes feel, the notch on your belt and if you use fancy scales you can look at your muscle mass. 

Another one that’s particularly relevant at this time of year is ‘dieting’. If you just calorie count you could be missing out on vital nutrients. Keeping an eye on the energy content of foods can be useful for some people but other self monitoring methods like how many portions of fruit and veg you’ve eaten or how you’re doing on the balance of your intake that day will tell you much more accurately about how you’re doing.  
#selfmonitoring #getactive #healthyapproach #balancedlife #healthy #doubleyummy #paediatricdietitian #registereddietitian #dietitian #reward #mumlife #momlife #weightloss #weightlossjourney #healthyapproach