In the last Willpower Moment Video, I explained the 4 step process of how best to adopt and guard your wellness habits. I call the process MASS (M-A-S-S, remember Mass-ive action)

The 4 steps include:

• Monitoring
• Accountability
• Schedule your exercise time
• Sleep – get enough sleep to make rationale decisions and to have enough energy to exercise and refrain from overeating.

Today I want to focus on the first step, which is Monitoring. In this technological age, you can monitor just about everything, to the point where monitoring can feel overwhelming and time consuming. That is why it is important to only monitor what is actually important to you – and have a quick-and-easy way to do it. With respect to wellness, study after study proves that people who track and monitor key activities (like their diet and exercise) and specific outcomes (like their body weight, blood cholesterol, glucose and blood pressure) get the best results. From having coached many people during my years of clinical practice, I can tell you that getting patients to write down everything they eat each day, and the exercises they performed, is a powerful way to improve adherence with wellness intentions.It really gets results.

However, it is very tedious to document all the food you eat each day, the beverages you drink, the supplements you ingest, as well as how many sets of each exercise you did, how many reps, how far you jogged or cycled etc. If you want to document and monitor things to that extent, you can simply click on the Diet and Activity Manager on the Dashboard page of the Meschino Wellness Platform and enter this data each day. Or you can use various apps on your mobile device to do the same, and then synch it with the Meschino Wellness Platform, which will display it on your Dashboard. However, this is a very time consuming exercise that most people will not stick with for a really long time.

That is why I created the Daily Wellness Checklist, which allows you to set up the key list of Dietary, Exercise and Supplement items you plan to adhere to each day and each week. At the end of the day, simply click on the Daily Wellness Checklist on the Dashboard page of the Meschino Wellness Platform and check off the items you completed. It takes less than a minute And that’s the key point. If you can monitor your progress each day and it takes less than a minute, then there is no excuse not to do it.

The truth is that this type of monitoring gets real results. If you haven’t done it yet, you will be amazed how much more compliant you will become after setting up your Daily Wellness Checklist and then checking off the items at the end of each day. It leads to real change.

Now there are other things you may want to track on a daily basis, or once a week, or once every three months, or once a year, depending on your health status. Once you complete the Health Risk Assessment on the Meschino Platform, it may recommend additional tracking tools that would make sense in your case, such as:

• Weekly Weight Tracker for overweight individuals
• Daily Mood Tracker for those with a history of a mood disorder
• Uric acid Tracker, every 3 months, for those with a history of gout
• Cholesterol Tracker, every three months, for those with a history of high cholesterol
• Daily or Weekly Blood Pressure Tracker for those with a history of high blood pressure
• Daily Stress Tracker for people reporting high levels of stress that are impacting their quality of life
• Daily Sleep Tracker for those fighting insomnia and sleep disturbance problems
• And of course, the Daily Step Tracker, a common tool that really helps people stay compliant with their 10,000 steps each day

The point is that monitoring is a critical part of succeeding with wellness goals. With monitoring there is no more fooling ourselves. A very large study recently showed that dieters who kept daily food and exercise diaries lost twice as much weight as those who didn’t. I will tell you that The Daily Wellness Checklist on the Dashboard page of the Meschino Wellness Platform will make much of this very simple and inspiring to do. It takes only one minute a day, but it will pave the way to some major changes. Often times in life it’s the little things that make a big difference, and this is very true for the one minute a day required to use the Daily Wellness Checklist.

Okay, remember that record makers are record breakers. So get on with task of monitoring your wellness behaviours and tracking key outcomes (weight, sleep, blood pressure etc.) that apply to your personal circumstances. Use the practice of simple monitoring to get the body and health outcomes you deserve.

Good luck with your wellness goals!

Dr. James Meschino
DC,MS, ROHP