Tracking your diet success is vital to your motivation. I, for example, am a person that is driven by results. If I see them I get even more motivated but if I don’t see them I lose motivation very quickly. Maybe you are the same or maybe you are different but either way, it’s very important that you watch your results so you know if you are still on the right track.

The first thing you want to do is to weigh yourself regularly. This is pretty obvious but exactly how often should you weigh yourself?

 

I personally weigh myself twice a week naked on an empty stomach in the morning. This has worked well for me, but if you feel you need an even more accurate value then weigh yourself every morning upon waking and note the weekly average.

 

When comparing your weight from week to week only look at the averages and not the individual days. This will give you the most accurate result possible. The only drawback to this method and the reason I don’t use it is because people tend to get obsessed with their weight when they weigh themselves every day. So, this is something you have to see for yourself.

I already talked about water retention and how it can change your appearance and weight. All this combined can really make you look like a completely different person from one day to another so don’t pay too much attention here.

 

Don’t get me wrong. What counts in the end is not how much your weight but how you feel and look so of course over the long run you should rely on the mirror. But a better strategy here is to take pictures maybe once a week and then compare them after a month or two.  

A third option is to take circumference measurements with a tape measure once per week and noting your measurements. The problem with this is that you will have to do it yourself rather than relying on a partner because two different people measuring with the same tape might get slightly different results and mess them up.

 

Another thing you can track are your subjective feelings of things like sleep quality, hunger, stress levels and fatigue once a week or after your workouts.

 

A good way to track this is by using a 0-5 scale (for example in regards to sleep 0 would be a good night of sleep and 5 would be insomnia). This is done to help you identify issue early and solve them quickly.

A good night of sleep will help you train better just like not enough sleep will hurt your training performance. Same with recovery and muscle retention when you are in a calorie deficit. Of course, hunger and hormone levels will also be suboptimal if you don’t sleep enough.

 

So if you feel weaker and are experiencing more cravings than normal, by using this scale and seeing that your sleep quality had been poor, you can identify the culprit and adjust your schedule.

 

Another example would be stress. So, if your weight hasn’t been coming down in the last few weeks, but your stress levels are higher than normal, then this might be something you want to look at. Maybe high cortisol levels are preventing you from losing weight or maybe you just made too many changes to your diet at once.

 

If you work out then another thing should track are your lifts. Getting weaker during a diet is normal but it should happen slowly and gradually. If you see your strength plummeting, you’re probably crash dieting and should revise your calorie deficit.

 

One more thing before I end this post. Tracking your stats is a great way to keep a good overview of your diet, but sometimes all this data can be overwhelming. For beginners tracking only your weight will probably be enough.

 

If you run into problems also track your subjective feelings and if you work out then tracking your lifts is a must anyway. Anything else is probably too much and we don’t want to overcomplicate this.