Three Essential Weight Loss Tools

Weight loss has been the aim in my house for 8 months now.  After many false starts I am happy to say that we are finally starting to see results.  And I’d like to share with you what I believe are essential tools to successful weight loss based on my own experience.  There are lots more “things” that are essential for weight loss such as a supportive environment, but here I just cover all the things you can pick up and play with!

A WIFI Enabled Scale (or a notebook and pen if you are freakishly disciplined)

Or in simple language, scales that will record your weight and allow you to view it with for instance an app on your iPhone.  Now I know what you are going to say – and the answer is yes, you can record your weight on a piece of paper yourself.  But if you are the type of person who doesn’t always write it down, or you always end up losing that bit of paper in-between diets, then you will love this type of scale.

Since having one of these scales, I’ve discovered that I unknowingly tend to bend the truth.  Not on purpose – just simply because I forget the facts.  For instance – this morning I hit a weight that I knew I hadn’t been down to in quite a while.  I felt a little bit good.  But when I looked at my history in the app, I discovered I hadn’t been down to that weight since I started using the WIFI scale at the beginning of my weight loss journey.  All of a sudden I went from feeling a bit good to “Oh wow!”.  I should have been really proud of myself but wasn’t simply because I couldn’t remember what had happened in the ups and downs of the last 8 months.  And it is important to know you are going well because it can give you the mental power to stay on track when you can see what you are doing is making a difference.  We have many variations of this story in our house where our own recollections are either too harsh or too complimentary and readings in the app have set us straight.

You don’t need to look at the app every day.  Most days you will be happy just to see the reading on the scales – so it isn’t another thing you need to worry about.  And if you get one that has an app on your iPhone, the graphs are never far away when you want to have a look at it.

A Calorie Counter

There are a lot of companies out there that make lots of money taking the thinking out of dieting.  They can help you lose weight, but ultimately in the long term you need the knowledge to plan the meals yourself.  Even diet books full of recipes aren’t the answer in my opinion because often they are full of time-consuming recipes and that don’t leave you with the knowledge of how to judge a recipe you might find elsewhere.  Essentially all these companies are trying to do the calorie counting for you – but get yourself my second essential tool – a calorie counter, and you can do it yourself and you will be able to look at any recipe and know if it will blow your calorie intake for the day.

I’ll be straight with you - it isn’t the most fun thing you could be doing.  But it can be quite educational.  You will never want to eat fast food chips again after looking up their calorie content!  And once you have done it for your favorite meals you never need to do it again. 

A Digital Kitchen Scale

This one goes hand in hand with a calorie counter.  Your cheap kitchen scale with the arrow and manual adjustment for containers just won’t cut it.  You need to know how big those potatoes are so you can work out how many calories they contain!

And that’s it.  Good luck with your weight loss – I hope these tips put you on the road to weight loss success too!