What is Self Monitoring?

Felicity Lyons — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 16:21:46 +0000

What is Self Monitoring?

Self monitoring is a a strategy that we use to help us learn more about ourselves and our ability to manage our behaviours. We can self monitor in many different ways e.g.

i. Weighing daily or weekly to learn about our weight trends

ii. Using a calendar and ticking the days when we achieve 10,000 steps or more

iii. Keeping a gratitude journal and entering a note each day to remind ourselves what we are thankful for

iv. Using a photo app to take photos of our meals and snacks to keep us mindful of our goals.

How is Self Monitoring used?

Self-monitoring is a cornerstone of both Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). When used well, self monitoring can help us to keep complete and accurate records of our behaviours, which can feel personally helpful. Sharing your monitoring records is also really helpful to any clinicians who might be supporting you.

How do I Self Monitor?

Focus: The most important thing to identify is the thing you want to monitor. If you want to look at managing your weight better, then just start with monitoring your weight. Weigh yourself weekly or daily and capture the information somewhere. You you can then discuss the information you have collected with someone who might be helping you.

Timing: Ideally you will weigh yourself at the same time each day or week, as this will help you to create a habit around weighing. This in turn takes the decision making out of your head, as e.g. you always weigh first thing in the morning.

Review: Again, ideally, you will look over the information you have collected at a particular time. You might choose to look at your information at the end of the day, or the week, or the month. The idea is to make a plan based upon the information you have collected, about yourself.

Interestingly, we know that when individuals collect information about themselves – self-monitoring – they are more interested in investing in making changes.

The benefits of Self Monitoring include:

1. Facilitating self-reflection – this is where we start to think more about how we behave, especially around food. Self monitoring can help us to identify feelings, emotions and spontaneous behaviours, so that we do not mis-remember or forget how we behaved in a particular circumstance.

2. Connecting the dots – when we have a more complete picture of how we behave, we can look at patterns e.g. how I might behave on the weekend, versus how I behave in the week.

We can look at triggers e.g. my route home involves walking past countless small supermarkets which trigger me to purchase somethings sweet.

Being able to identify thoughts and patterns can then help you to come up with strategies to deal with tricky scenarios.

3. Encouraging skill utilisation – actively self monitoring in the moment e.g. sitting down with a biscuit whilst tapping into a food diary app, may help us to behave differently. We might choose to eat only half the biscuit or decide not to eat it at all. This is an example of noticing our behaviours, and coming up with other ways of behaving.

4. Making a routine of regular eating – if we have notifications or reminders to eat on an app, it helps us to regularly log what we are having and create good habits around a pattern of eating. You don’t have to use an app on your phone, you can have a meal plan and simply tick when you have consumed that meal. This is particularly helpful when struggling to eat enough, and particularly helpful too if you spend the day grazing on snacks.

Where to from here?

So I think you can see why self monitoring is considered a foundation of lifestyle related behaviour change. I can’t think of any behaviour I might want to work on, where monitoring will not help me to move forward.

If you want me to help you figure out how to best use self-monitoring for your particular lifestyle related health condition, get in touch.

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Normal Eating – do you eat normally?

Felicity Lyons — Mon, 23 Nov 2020 16:00:53 +0000

How many calories? How much fat?

Everyone has an idea of normal eating, though they may not know it. Often the way a person has been brought up to eat, will constitute their normal eating pattern. But of course, we are all brought up to eat quite differently. We eat for so many different reasons. We eat for health and to give our bodies energy to do things. We eat for fun and to celebrate joyful events. We eat when we are sad and need comfort. We eat when we are bored. And of course… we eat when we are hungry. Almost forgot : )

But what is normal eating?

Normal eating is what’s considered acceptable in terms of eating patterns, not just to ourselves, but also to society. For a dietitian, there are many different aspects of eating to cover when supporting an individual through an eating disorder. What is ‘normal’ is likely to have become increasingly skewed overtime as the eating disorder has progressed.

Eating certain foods at different times of the day, not eating when hungry, eating only foods that are on a safe list, eating only certain amounts of different foods. Some individuals restrict foods so much, the eating disorder drives a binge, perhaps a purge, or other weight control behaviour. Changes to eating behaviours can become insidious as little by little the individual changes how they cope with food. Trying to change a skewed idea of eating is the challenge of the dietitian working in eating disorders. This is what normal eating should look like.

We want to:

Eat regularly e.g. 3 times per day plus a snack or two
Consume foods we know are good for us like fruits and vegetables
Enjoy foods we like e.g. chocolate or cheese
Choose from all the food groups
Feel confident to choose to be vegan or vegetarian but not because it’s offering us opportunity to restrict our foods
Feel confident we can eat in front of other people and participate in social events based around food

We also want it to be okay to occasionally

Treat ourselves to super processed foods like food from a fast food joint
Overeat and need to rest afterwards – think Diwali, or Christmas or Hannukah
Undereat because we are going out to dinner later and want to save space to have more than one course

We don’t want to

Spend our lives counting calories though this can sometimes be helpful
Weigh ourselves more than once a day – and for some this could be once per week
Become obsessed with health
Avoid treat foods such as crisps or chocolate because we are told they are bad for us
Play games – pretending we have an allergy when we are trying to restrict our intake

We need to understand that

Our bodies are fuelled by the food we eat
We need lots of different kinds of foods to carry out the functions of normal living
If we deprive our bodies of food we will experience surges of appetite hormones
Our brains are involved in all of our decisions around food
Our gut and the microbiome affect our mental health so we need to nourish our gut

Eating normally is about so many different things. There is a lot to work through when trying to get better from a state where how you eat is really not normal. Eating according to proteins or carbohydrate or fat content can be fine – but really that’s for dietitians to guide you through. Fasting, then over-eating, then fasting again really doesn’t work. Dietitians work to find your happy place where it’s food that you are eating, not nutrients. Eating normally is about ticking the bullets above, and eating in a healthful way. No food is off limits. Food is fun and can have a wonderful place in your life… if you can let it.

Further information about eating disorders can be found here. If you feel you need help with managing an eating disorder please get in touch.

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Eating Disorders Archives - Felicity Lyons

What is Self Monitoring?