This time of year most individuals and families are very busy with their every day lives, especially during the holiday season. A great way to keep you and your family on track with diet and exercise is to keep a log. Logging diet and exercise can benefit you in a few different ways:
- Prevent over/under eating: By keeping a log of the foods you are taking in, you will get a visual of your daily nutrients. By seeing the foods and calories on paper, you can better delegate if you have not eaten enough for the day or if you have taken in more calories than you should have.
- Meal planning: By logging and planning your meals ahead of time you can have a more organized eating schedule. This type of planning before the work week begins can help to prevent eating unhealthy processed foods, or fast food trips.
- Motivation: Logging your meals and exercise can help to motivate you to eat healthy and exercise more often. If you log not working out or bad eating habits for multiple days each week, this can help you see that you may to need to step it up the following week, by taking in more nutritious foods, logging more workouts.
- Goal Stetting: Logging a fitness or diet goal each week will keep you on track with your healthy habits. Example goals may be "eat a fruit and veggie every day this week" or "progress to a light jog for 5 minutes during weekly walk."
- Record Achievements: Once you have been logging your fitness and nutrition habits for a few weeks or months you can look back and see where you began to where you are now. In the beginning you may have only been able to do 15 minutes of cardio and are now up to 30 minutes, or you may have snacked on unhealthy foods like chips and cookies but have now replaced them with fruits and veggies.
I have had greater success losing weight this way than dieting.
Just a small additional note: In a sense you are on a diet. By cutting everything in half, watching the sweets and desserts, cutting tomatoes, you have created a diet that works for you...and that is the most important diet you can do! I am glad the lack of tomatoes have had a positive affect on your psoriasis. Tomatoes have both citric and sulfuric acids which directly affect the dehydration of the sweat glands of the skin. This is can cause the escalation of psoriasis. Good luck with the continued relief!
Thank you for the explanation as to why the acid has an impact on my psoriasis. I always like to know why these food items have such an impact on me. I have also added an Evening Primrose Oil supplement to my daily routine. I have had extremely dry skin, even while using lotions, since I was diagnosed with it. It will be interesting in January whether I will be able to control the winter dryness more effectively. My dermatologist also recommended trying to avoid pork as there are indications it affects psoriasis and the related arthritis which I have.