Tracking your progress is a key component of successful weight loss. It's a little annoying at first, but can easily make the difference between success and failure.
You can track progress in many different ways; some ways will be painful and some will be relatively easy or fun to do. You get no credit for picking unnecessarily difficult paths here, so I recommend you pick what is easiest for you.
For beginners, I recommend only tracking your consistency, which just means tracking the days you do the activity (as a "yes" or "no"). This just gets you in the habit of doing something for yourself. Keep the barrier low so you're likely to succeed.
For example, you might make a checkmark on a calendar on days you go to the gym (regardless of how hard you work at the gym). For diet, you might track which days you avoided alcohol, or which days you ate cooked food. Simply tracking these things will probably cause some improvement at first, and give you enough motivation to continue.
Once you've got the habit down, you can slowly crank up the "difficulty". For example, maybe you actually track how many drinks you have each week (rather than just how many days you didn't have drinks). Or maybe you start tracking specific exercises in the gym, or calories burned.
I've been seriously dieting and exercising for about 6 months now, and here's how I track things:
I manually track my calories eaten in a custom Google Sheets spreadsheet.
I have two goals in the spreadsheet: eat fewer than 2,000 calories, and eat more than 200 grams of protein a day.
Every time I eat something, I add it to the spreadsheet. I have one tab that lists all the foods themselves - calories, protein, fat, carbs, and alcohol.
Then, I have another tab called "log" that lists which food I ate, at what time, and how much.
I then have a "daily stats" tab that sums the macros for each of the log entries, and tells me where I am relative to my targets.
With this basic information, I then generate several other reports that show me calories over time - 7-day averages, 30-day averages, etc.
Tracking my 7-day and 30-day averages have been very useful for days where I go over my limit. It puts the day into perspective; I can feel okay going over one day if my previous 6 days were consistently under.
Yet, if I see that my 7-day or 30-day average is above 2,000 calories, then I know that I should work to reduce next week.
The key is not beating myself up for any particular day, but help me plan for the upcoming week/month.
I use three different apps to track my fitness:
This happened somewhat by accident; I bought the Oura ring for sleep. I bought a Samsung Galaxy watch to track my heart rate and activity, which uses Samsung Health. And then Google Fit was already loaded on my Android device.
At first, I thought it was overkill, but I have come to appreciate having my activity tracked multiple different ways. The tracking itself is automatic, so there's no extra work for me, and I can triangulate any "calories burned" estimations across the apps.
Generally I pay the most attention to miles walked and calories burned during those periods, alongside calories burned while working out. It's also nice to be able to precisely track my heart rate at all times with my Galaxy Watch. I find it very useful to know quantitatively how hard I'm working at any given moment.
Technically, if I burn a lot of calories in a day, I could eat more and remain at a deficit. However, I think it's simpler not to change my diet and just consider these additional calories burned as "bonus" to balance against periodically overeating on certain days.
You may have noticed that another thing I could be tracking is how much I am lifting on exercise days, and you would be right. I am actually not tracking my progress here closely yet.
Since my current goal is weight loss and not muscle gain, it doesn't matter as much. However, I expect to at least begin to write down my "personal best" for bench press, squat, and deadlift soon.
How do you track your weight loss progress? Let me know @dackerman on Twitter.