Habits (from the Latin habitudo, habitudinis, physical or moral structure) are the dispositions or attitude acquired through a repeated experience. This disposition is inherent in the behavior of humans and animals. Every day, what we do is partly due to our habits and to keep our lifestyle under control it may be a good idea to control them. This will lead us to observe what and how we do it. Furthermore, we will be able to better weigh our actions by observing their long-term contribution to our psychophysical health.
There are an infinite number of applications and systems to keep track of your habits in this article I report some of those with which I have found myself best and I have found most useful.
Food intake
Keeping track of your diet is not only necessary for those suffering from certain diseases but can also be a good idea for healthy people. Furthermore, it makes it easier for anyone who trains to reach a certain physical goal, which is unthinkable without proper nutrition.
In this case we use the Lifesum application that allows us to keep track of foods considering their nutritional profile and calorie intake. Divide the day into:
- Breakfast
- Lunch
- Snack
- Dinner
For each of these we can enter the different foods ingested. The app allows you to search through millions of different foods with detailed nutritional information, such as calories, fats, carbohydrates and proteins. This not only allows you to discover your diet and correct your diet by keeping the calorie intake under control for weeks but leads to a real dietary education. With the passing of the days it will be automatic to think about the nutritional profile of the single food.
There are other very useful functions that calculate your lifestyle and allow you to set particular goals, in terms of calories, variety of foods and nutrition.
Diet or food education
The application therefore allows you to keep track of your diet and, unless there are pathological cases in which a specific diet is required, it allows anyone to have their own personalized diet. With small guidelines it is possible to follow a flexible diet that leads to the achievement of one’s goals and maintains the best possible health status.
The application integrates with most apps for managing health and health data and this also allows you to compare calories consumed and consumed.
Training
Speaking of training, perhaps this is precisely the area where it is most important to track your activity so as to actually monitor progress. Without going into the specifics of training theories and particular types of training, it is still possible to trace some general data such as the duration of the training, the calories burned, any improvements, type of exercises done, etc.
This can be done in various ways. For example, you can use Notion. You can create a table containing all the fields of interest in order to enter the different training days. If the same training scheme is repeated over and over (typical of weight rooms), it is also possible to create predefined templates so that for each session it is sufficient to update the date, heat, duration and increase of loads, as well as any personal notes that may be useful.
Fitness tracker
In order to make the data collected sufficiently truthful it is useful to use a fitness tracker. They are watches and smart bands equipped with sensors to monitor heart rate, movements, gps and much more. There are many products, in this case we will focus on the Apple Watch, using the Health and Activity app. In any case, what has been said is easily replicable with other products / software. Using the clock we can track every single workout by monitoring the heart rate and calories burned. Added to this are several useful features within the Health app to check your habits.
In particular, it is possible to keep in memory and analyze:
- Tracking your workouts
- Caloric intake, macronutrients and water
- Monitor caffeine intake (with additional app)
- Body mass index, weight and fat mass (with smart scale)
- Steps and daily activity
- Hours of sleep
- Heart rate
Changing habits
To create new positive habits, you definitely have to insist day after day. You don’t need apps or sophisticated systems but simply repeat it day after day. It is true that keeping track of our progress can still help us reach the goal. In this case a great tool is Notion with the “Habit Tracker” template.
Notion.so is your own workspace management and productivity tool. By taking advantage of the application, available via web browser, computer and smartphone, it is possible to better organize one’s commitments, both for private and working life. There are several interesting features including the ability to write and plan your own activities by creating databases, tables, timelines, shared documents and much more. You can also collaborate in real time with other users and keep shared documents that also contain multimedia files. There are many layouts and templates already set up that allow you to plan the different activities in the best possible way. Change history can be tracked and synchronization is instant.
In this template each row is a new day and each column is a customizable habit. This allows us to easily keep track of what we do and have a monthly report. Through this tool, which is easy and immediate to implement, we can immediately realize the time lost and how we can optimize downtime in improving our habits. You can set daily goals and use the table to track how many days they actually completed. In the long run this will lead us to improve our behavior and focus more on positive habits by dedicating the available time to them.
Disclaimer
Don’t refer to power / diet / training combinations. The different images refer to different subjects in different physical conditions. Both nutrition and training could be dictated by particular pathological conditions. In particular, most of the workouts with appear in the text refer to a situation with particular muscle-tendon problems so they are studied ad hoc and may seem meaningless for a completely healthy person.
Always refer to your doctor and ask for the intervention of a specialist before proceeding with diets or training programs.
