Live strong * How to Measure Your Health and Fitness Progress ...

There are a number of ways in which you can measure success. When it comes to your health and fitness it is important that you measure your progress by both new healthy habits and your appearance. The most important measures of success with a health and fitness program is the long-term decrease in medical problems, injury and other health risks while improving your quality of life either with or without weight loss.

You can also measure short and medium term changes regularly during the process of your health and fitness program. Some obvious changes can be noted in health related behavior patterns like a decreased need for medications, an increased ability to perform physical tasks, a reduce fat intake and an increased intake of dietary fiber, vitamins and minerals.

Watch what you eat closely:

One way to make great improvement towards a healthier lifestyle is by making slight changes to how your food is cooked and prepared. You may even notice yourself checking labels at the grocery store or discovering new tastes and textures for food. If you feel good about yourself and know about these changes then you are more likely to keep making progress with your health and fitness program.

A physical way in which you can measure your progress towards a healthier appearance is by measuring the fat distribution through the waist circumference and waist-hip ration or WHR. Abdominal obesity is most commonly linked to risk factors such as diabetes and heart disease. This is why any slight reduction you notice in waist circumference or in the WHR is a good step towards having a healthier fat distribution in your body even if you aren?t actively losing weight.

Body fat can be a good measure of fitness:

Another way you can use to measure you physical progress is through body fat measuring with either hydrostatic weighing, electrical impedance or just by using skin fold calipers. The last method is obviously the cheapest and most accessible method. However, it is also a less accurate method, but it will give you at least a beginning point for you to measure decrease in your body fat.

No matter how you choose to measure your physical progress you should never rely on a scale for your indicator. Your overall weight loss in numbers and pounds doesn?t determine your healthy progress. Your weight is merely a combined total of both your lean body weight and body fat weight. Two individuals can have the save body weight while having completely different body compositions. One individual can be in more shape than a person with the exact same weight.

A scale has no way of measuring your body composition and the actual changes that are occurring. While a scale may show you?ve lost seven pounds it can?t tell you if half of the weight was muscle loss and water instead of fat. People also become discouraged when the scale shows they haven?t lost any weight but in fact they have lost pounds of fat and just replaced it with healthy, firm and fat-burning muscle. So consider other methods other than the scale to get a true measure of your health and fitness progress.

Source: http://coloncleansedigest.net/how-to-measure-your-health-and-fitness-progress/

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