In every football game it is important to know your stats and your game plan, and part of knowing your game plan is having a good playbook.
When you are beginning a new healthy lifestyle you also need a playbook. This playbook which I am referring to is a food and exercise journal.
If you’ve been following GUIDEPOSTS’ New Healthy You program, you have discovered by now the first step of this 12-week process, which is keeping a food and exercise journal and getting to know your stats; thus the playbook.
Just as keeping a playbook and stats is important in every ballgame, journaling is also a vital part of losing weight and becoming healthier.
Using the playbook, or journal, to reflect upon helps you to see what and how much you’ve eaten, how hard and how often you exercise, how you felt when you ate certain foods or did certain work outs, and it helps to keep a record of successes and failures, thus aiding in developing a game plan that works best for you.
Several times over the past few months as I reflected on my playbook I realized many changes that I needed to make. For example, Julie suggested that I occasionally have a high calorie day to trick my body into losing more weight. I noticed that after having one of those higher calorie days I would feel a little sluggish. I quickly came to realize if I would exercise a little longer or harder it would make me feel more energetic, not to mention it was better to burn those extra calories in order to offset the high calories I had consumed.
I also noticed when journaling that something must have caused one of my plateaus, as I was doing everything exactly the same. As I looked back over my journal I discovered that when I did an exercise at my heavier weight I burned more calories than what I was burning at my lighter weight for the same amount of time. As a result I figured out that I needed to increase my duration of time in order to get the same effect.
It takes a little time and effort to write it all down, but if you don’t you are much more likely to consume more calories than you burn. As I discovered recently during the holidays, after I had quit writing it down for a short period of time, there was no possible way that I could keep up with my calorie intake versus output just in my head. This realization has made me a believer in the importance of journaling.
So, in anticipation of the upcoming Super Bowl (go Saints!) I want to encourage you to get out your playbook and develop a winning game.
This is your year to go all the way!
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