Track Your Weight Loss Success

Tracking your weight loss is helpful to keep you focused on the plan. It can also be another form of encouragement!

I started my Excel spreadsheet in 2001 - 4 diets ago. :) I've tracked weekly weight loss (and then gain) each time until I gave up... UNTIL this time.

This past year (July 2007) I started tracking for the fourth time on a new sheet in my Excel workbook file. I have the past diet losses to compare with, which is a bit fun.

You may be wondering what should be "tracked". Well, I weigh in (and record my weight) every Friday morning. I type in this weight in one column. I then have other columns give me some calculations to show how much I've lost during the past week, how much I've lost total since I started and the average pounds lost per week. I also have two more columns - the date and the total number of weeks I've been dieting. This time I also added one more column for the total percentage of body weight I've lost so far.

My stats this week are:
55 weeks completed, 88 pounds lost total, average of 1.6 pounds lost per week, lost 34.38% of my total weight since I started.

So, go ahead... begin a new tracking system whether it's in Excel or some other format. It's just good to have that weekly date to look forward to and also great to have a record of goals met and weight loss to be able to look back at and get encouraged!

Something else to track would be inches lost... more on that another time!