For most people who are particularly health-conscious, a lot of effort and measures are undertaken to ensure that good health and figure is maintained. This includes regularly monitoring your ideal or goal weight and paying close attention to what you eat and do. At first it might seem very difficult to commit to this, but when you do have the will, you can develop your own personal health scale. Here’s how to do it.
- Start with a definite goal in mind. We all have ideas of what a perfectly healthy body is. But since there’s no accurate good health measure, nor can health be measured per se, we resort to creating our own goals to achieve a level that represents our ideal picture of good health. It varies for every person and can be something like achieving your goal weight to something like losing 5 to 10 pounds within your specified amount of time. Now if you work around specific, realistic, and practical goals, you’ll be able to concentrate more on what you need to do to achieve them.
- Invest in a health scale. A model like the UC-321 A4-sized Weight Watcher and Personal Health Scale is both very practical and useful, particularly for someone who’s always so busy and mobile. Technically, you can use any kind of reliable weighing scale—from a personal bathroom weighing scale to a clinical scale. But this wonderful device not only helps you monitor your weight, it also includes other practical functions and special features such as a built-in memory function or data bank, a Body Mass Index or BMI calculation function, a target weight setting function, and Weight Diary software that is free and can be downloaded online. This Weight Diary enables you to input personal data like height, weight, BMI, etc. and helps you determine your weight and BMI development or trend. You can also fill out a list of your daily food intake and activities. Tracking and recording all of these would ultimately help you in drafting and planning your own eating, exercising, or physical activities and habits.
- Create a personal calendar and diary. Whether you’ve decided to go old school by using an ordinary weighing scale or modern by using a device like the UC-231, you have to draft a personal calendar that can also serve as your health diary. In this calendar, you’ll be recording the date, your weight, and other significant information.
- Weigh yourself everyday. Take note of your initial and/or average weight first. Then weigh yourself at least twice a day—once every morning right after you get up and before you have your breakfast, then once again every evening after your last meal and before going to bed. Remember to record your weight in your personal calendar every time that you check it. Make sure to also always include the time that you recorded your weight.
- Be observant and mindful. Always take note of what you eat or drink, and every kind of physical activity that you do within the day.
- Record everything significant. At the end of the day, or whenever it is that you can pour all your attention into your personal calendar and diary, gather all information and write it down—what you ate and drank and at what times of the day, what physical activities you did and at what time you started and finished doing them. You can also include your state of health (i.e. whether you had any kind of ailment or illness on that particular day), a comment, observation, comparison, etc. Just make sure that you keep this up faithfully everyday and to write neatly and clearly. This way, you’d easily be able to keep track of certain kinds of food responsible for your weight gain, and activities that helped in your weight loss.
Make regular reviews and evaluation. Of course the purpose of recording all that data you have inputted is enabling you to make a personal review and assessment. If you think about it, your records also serve as your very own personalized health inventory and even a stress scale at times. By making a careful review, observation, comparison, etc. of trends in your records, and even subject yourself to a reliability scale, you’d be able to base your own health scale or health goal plans on what works best for you.