In this lesson, we will cover two very important topics, identifying support and self-monitoring. The learning objectives for this lesson are learners will identify three key people who can support them in their weight loss efforts, and learners will understand the importance of self-monitoring and develop a plan for self-monitoring. Trying to lose weight can certainly be looked at as an uphill battle. It's not easy, it's not automatic, and it requires, as you have seen, lots of planning. Remember, diets don't work, at least not in the long run. You've invested your time in taking this course, which provides you with your own personalized weight loss plan. You're going to have some tough times as you start to implement your plan. You might have a hard time sticking to your exercise plan, or you might struggle to keep your calorie intake down at celebrations or in restaurants. The hard work will pay off for sure, but who can you turn to in those inevitable tough times? Take time now to identify in advance three key support people who can give you advice, help you find information, give you assistance, direction, or guidance. One person might be a spouse or partner, maybe your best friend. Sometimes co-workers or neighbors are good support people, or even healthcare professional like your doctor, or your dietitian. Who are those three key people? Write their names down now on your worksheet for this lesson. Self-monitoring means keeping track of your progress to your goal weight and keeping track of your food intake and your exercise. According to the Evidence Analysis Library of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, strong evidence shows that for adults who need or desire to lose weight, self-monitoring of food intake improves nutrition-related outcomes related to weight loss and weight maintenance. Self-monitoring is one of the most effective tools in helping you lose weight and keeping it off. Let's make a plan now to use self-monitoring to track your weight, your calorie intake, your food groups for good nutrition, and your minutes of exercise when you start your personal weight loss plan. The easiest self-monitoring tool you can use is SuperTracker. It's free and it's very user friendly. We provided you with the user guide for SuperTracker in the menu writing assignment for week two, lesson one. Please go back and grab that and keep it handy, referring to it if needed as we go along. Let's start by logging into SuperTracker using your username and your password. Next we go to my coach center, so you should activate my coach center now by setting up your personal goals. You'll come to a screen now that says my top 5 goals. You're allowed to set 5 goals for yourself in SuperTracker. So first of all, you want to select the tab weight management. The question is, do you want to maintain current weight or move towards a goal weight? And so when you entered your profile when we first started with SuperTracker, you already entered this information. You selected your current weight and your goal weight, and so just verify that that information is still correct. Next, we move to physical activity tab. Enter the minutes per week that you selected in the first lesson when you planned your physical activity exercise plan. I'm entering 300 minutes per week, keeping in mind that a minimum of 150 minutes is required in order to achieve weight loss. We move now to the calorie tab. You have a choice of a goal here to stay within your total calorie limit or to set a personal calorie goal that might be 100 calories less than what SuperTracker gave you. So, you can enter a personal calorie level, 1500 calories is what I entered, whereas Supertracker planned 1600 for me. I would definitely not go lower than 100 calories less than what SuperTracker planned based on your input. So now we've set three of the five goals in SuperTracker. Move towards the goal weight, and it gives you the date on which that was set, meet physical activity goal, 300 minutes per week is what I used in my example. And then setting a personal calorie goal, 1600 calories. You can track how am I doing by visiting the weight manager, and you can see your weekly trend with physical activity and with your personal calorie goal once you start entering your physical activity, your weight, and your calorie intake into SuperTracker. The next tab for setting goals is food groups. You can select one food group or two food groups, keeping in mind that you can only set five goals. So you might want to go back and forth here between food groups and the next tab, which would be nutrients. I selected one from each of these two categories, food groups and nutrients, to make my fourth and fifth goal. I selected vegetables, so that I could really pay attention to my intake of vegetables, I want to meet my target for all of these. But, again, vegetables is of special concern, for me and for most people, I would say. The next tab would be nutrients, calcium, vitamin D, potassium, dietary fiber, folate, iron, vitamin B12 are nutrients that many people don't get enough of in their diet. Sodium and saturated fat are nutrients that people typically get too much of in their diet. I want to track especially my sodium intake and try to limit that. So I clicked on sodium and then clicked on the blue button add. We finished entering then my top 5 goals, and now we move to my weight manager. So here you enter your current weight and you track it over time. This will create for you a weight history chart that will show your weight loss pattern. So, this is important for tracking your progress towards your goal weight. Your weight history chart will show over time, how your calories and physical activity affect your weight. You can use this to see if you need to adjust your eating or your physical activity. For example, increasing less calories may help you move your weight down. SuperTracker has a very unique food tracker function. You can use this, just as we did in the menu writing assignment in lesson two, in order to track your day to day food intake. You'll print off your daily food group targets, your calorie and food groups report. And you can see every day how you've reached your food group target and how close you've come to your daily calorie limit. You can also track your physical activity using the physical activity tracker function of SuperTracker. All of the information, your physical activity target, your daily calorie intake, your daily food group targets, and your weight can all be monitored and tracked using SuperTracker. When you first log on to SuperTracker, now that you've set up the goals and the weight history and the weight manager, you can immediately go to either food tracker, or physical activity tracker, or my weight manager, or my top 5 goals, in order to move quickly to track the foods that you eat, to track your activities or to enter your weight and track your progress over time. As time goes by when you're implementing your personalized weight loss program, you may want to choose some of those top 5 goals for change. You might want to lower you calorie intake, you might want to increase your physical activity. And so you would do that in my top 5 goals by making changes to the numbers that we just entered. There are plenty of self-monitoring tools out there other than SuperTracker. There are apps, for example, Lose It, there are online diaries, for example, fitday.com. And there's the old-fashioned pencil and paper records that you can set up for yourself in an online format, an Excel spreadsheet, or just plain old pencil and paper notebook. It's totally up to you. Keep in mind though, self-monitoring is a really effective tool. In order to get all of the weight loss benefits of self-monitoring, this needs to become part of your daily routine. Just like your exercise plan, you need a self-monitoring plan. So let's record your self-monitoring plan right now on the worksheet for this lesson. When will you enter your weight, daily, or every other day, or maybe once a week? Remember our earlier lesson on how and when to weigh yourself and refer back to that if needed. When will you enter one day's worth of food intake into the food tracker? This needs to be done every day, but the time of day is up to you. What time is best for you to do this? Would it be best for you to enter the entire day after dinner? Or would it be easier for you to enter your intake after lunch and include dinner from the previous day, any night time snacks, breakfast of the current day and the lunch that you just consumed. Write your plan to monitor your calorie intake on your worksheet. Using SuperTracker, your food groups for good nutrition will automatically be available on your calories and food group reports. Is this going to be your plan? Last, what is the best way for you to monitor your minutes of exercise? Will you use SuperTracker? When will you enter your minutes of exercise if you decide to do so? Every day when you are entering your food intake? What time of day will you do this? It makes sense to enter your food intake and exercise at the same time, at what ever time of day is best for you. Your assignment for this lesson is to be sure that you've written out your plan on your work sheet. How will you monitor your weight, your calorie intake, your food groups for good nutrition and your minutes of exercise? And how will you remember to do this everyday? What can you use to remind yourself to do this? Remembering how important self-monitoring is to your overall success at losing weight and keeping it off.
