Why it’s useful to keep a weight loss diary for obesity patients?
Obesity treatment requires not only following doctor’s recommendations for proper nutrition, but also changes in eating behavior and lifestyle.
One of the methods that help to correct eating behavior is keeping a food diary in which patient reflects the place and time of eating, a set of dishes, portion sizes and calorie count. It is important to understand why the patient eats (whether she feels hungry, eats “for company” with someone, or because of stress).
Analyzing the food diary allows to correct lifestyle, identify bad eating habits and external factors that contribute to obesity.
In the same diary it is useful to keep a log of physical activities and weight dynamics.
Obesity patient should set short-term real goal for weight loss. Keeping a diary helps to create motivation to achieve this goal.
Why is it better to keep a weight loss diary in Goopatient?
Of course, you can keep a diary in a regular notebook, but you will quickly realize that it’s quite difficult. You cannot correct the structure of records and it will be difficult to analyze them. And in the end, you’ll just stop keeping a diary.
Now there are quite a few weight-loss apps that make keeping a food/activity diary much more convenient. As a rule the app contains a list of dishes/activities and you do not need to enter them manually every time. In addition, they allow you to quickly list records by specific parameter in order to analyze the impact of this parameter on your obesity.
However, usually these are very specialized apps. On the one hand, it’s good, because it is easy to enter weight, calories, distance... On the other hand, you can’t keep track of other factors that are important for treating obesity. For example, you can’t enter lab test results, side effects (heartburn, pressure), medications taken and procedures like ultrasound, ECG, exact doctor’s recommendations ...
Goopatient is a very flexible program. It allows you to enter any entries and organize them using #hashtags, just like you do on Facebook or Twitter. In this case, you can control not only the weight loss process but also all other aspects associated with obesity treatment.
Sample entries by obesity patients in Goopatient
#weight 121 kg, goal 110 kg (BMI 25) before the summer
begin to put 2 sugar tablespoons in tea = minus 20 #calories
was nervous about mom, could not resist and ate chocolate #stress
today resumed to #run and #exercise
again #heartburn after lunch, possibly because of tomatoes #diet
#heart ached after rising to the 3rd floor, #pressure 140/90
Today visited the clinic, did #ECG and #ultrasoud - OK.
#blood_analysis - #Leptin level is slightly elevated
#Dr_Adams said that if #Phentermine and diet have no effect before the summer and weight is over 120 kg, then I can proceed to bariatric surgery
Review
Goopatient - really helps I like the program and so does my physician. I can print out the notes that I want to show to the doc and just give him to read. Although the program does not build graphs like in Lifesum, but for obesity these graphs are not very useful. And you can enter records in free form, as you wish. For 3 months managed to lose 11 kg. I think the program really helps. Charly Sunersby - Rating: 4.7 -
