Week 3

By now you will be starting to feel the benefits of your actions from the first two weeks and will be getting more confident by the day, at hitting your calorie and step targets. These simple daily and weekly habits are going to form the foundations of your progress throughout this programme, so from this point onwards I want you to take it as a given that if nothing else, your actions for the week will always be to plan your week, and hit your calorie and step targets.

Now, you know that these two actions are key for you losing weight. But they alone are not enough to guarantee success. The reason being, that inaccuracies/inconsistencies will inevitably occur, especially when you are just getting started!

Just because you think you have had 2000 calories a day, and done 10,000 steps, doesn’t NECESSARILY, mean that you have. This is why people can often be confused when they BELIEVE they have eaten only 1200 calories a day and don’t lose weight.

So this week the focus is on really homing in on making sure that the efforts you are putting in to tracking your calories and steps, are going to be rewarded. The best way we can do that, is by ensuring your tracking is as accurate as possible, for both your steps and for your calories.

When it comes to tracking your calories there are a number of different ways in which we can make mistakes. Misinterpreting portion sizes, simply being unaware that something needs to be tracked, just forgetting to track something!

To ensure that you avoid making these mistakes as much as you can, there is a full section of videos on ‘How to Track Your Calories Properly” in the learning library for you to watch.

So the first of your actions this week is to watch those videos, reflect on if you may be making any of those mistakes when it comes to your tracking so far, and continue this week ensuring you are tracking your calories as accurately as possible.

When it comes to tracking steps, there are much fewer ways in which you can be inaccurate. Of course if you don’t wear your tracker, or don’t have whatever you use to track your activity with you for the day, then it becomes complete guess work. So try to be consistent with having that on you. The main inaccuracy besides that from my experience, comes with wrist worn trackers.

If you wear a tracker on your wrist, it is highly likely that some of your movements throughout the day, will be recorded as steps. Which may not seem a problem, activity is activity right?

However there are situations where this can cause some major inaccuracies with people’s activity levels throughout the day. For example – I had a client who was working in an office all day typing on a keyboard. This movement was incorrectly recorded as thousands of extra steps every day. I myself had my Fitbit tell me I had done 10,000 steps by 10am one day when all I had done was peel and chop vegetables for my lunch.

Now there isn’t a lot you can do about this. The most important thing is just to be aware of it, because if by no fault of your own you are being led to believe you are more active than you actually are, it will have a significant impact on the progress you make.

Not only that but if this is happening, then it is likely the results you get won’t match up with your expectations, and that is something that often can lead to people being disheartened and going off track.

So this week your target should be to ensure you are tracking both your calories and steps as accurately as possible, to ensure that you truly are hitting both targets, and in doing so guaranteeing you get the results you are after.

Week 3 Summary

• Watch ‘How to Track Your Calories Properly” in the learning library
• Reflect on the last couple of weeks, and think about if you have perhaps been making some of these common mistakes when tracking
• Continue tracking with these things in mind – as accurately as possible!