Tracking Your Progress With the Venus Factor

TRACKING YOUR PROGRESS WITH THE VENUS FACTOR

On a diet, success is usually measured by how quickly you lose weight. In fact, the more weight you lose in the shortest period of time, the more successful you are on a diet. As an example, if someone loses 20 or more pounds in 4 weeks, everyone will ask what they're doing. If they only lose 8 pounds in 4 weeks, people won't really be impressed.

The Venus Factor is different. It trains you to measure success not just by how much weight you've lost, but by many other different victories. Each victory, whether big or small, counts as a success. Losing weight is the end goal, but it shouldn't be your only goal.

Progress Tracking Tools

Membership to the Venus Factor comes with tools that help you determine how you can successfully navigate your diet. However, there are other tools that you can use in addition to these that can help you track your progress more efficiently.

MyFitnessPal is the default progress tracking tool for the members of the Venus community. It's free, and is available as an app for your phone or tablet. You can use it to keep track of how much water you consumed, what you ate, how many inches you lost and how much weight you've lost. You can view your progress as a line graph so you can get a sense of how you're doing.

You may also want to use a pedometer or a similar app that keeps count of how many steps you take each day. Professionals recommend that you walk at least 10,000 steps every day. Walking is a very natural way to get exercise. You don't have to push or exert yourself. The more you move, the more active you will be.

How to Measure Success

The reason the progress tracking tools were mentioned is because these tools are how you're going to measure your progress and success. You can use them to set small goals for yourself to help you to reach the bigger goal of losing weight.

Let's say, as an example, you don't like exercise, water or vegetables, but you love sweets. How are you going to lose weight?

The answer is simple: use your tracking tools to set goals.

Here are a few goals that you can set for yourself:

? Drink 20 ounces of water every day. This is a big step if you don't like water.
? Eat one vegetable every day. Again, this is huge if you hate vegetables.
? Instead of walking 10,000 steps, make a goal of walking 1,000 steps.
? Eat one sweet a day.

Do this for about a week. Use your tracking tools to measure your progress. Now go back and see how many days you reached your goal.

Let's say you only had one day within the week where you were "good" and you met all four of your goals. That's still a success.

If you met only one goal every day, that's still a success. What you don't realize is you are taking very small steps towards a very big goal. For most people these changes cannot be sudden. They have to be gradual so that you can get used to them before you can take everything to the next level.

What to Do If You "Fail"

What if you don't reach any of your goals at all? Does this count as failure?

No !!

As a famous songwriter once said, "If at first you don't succeed, dust yourself off and try again."

It's going to take a lot of hard work to break yourself of the bad habits that caused you to gain weight. You have to be patient with yourself and realize that you are only human.

In fact, if you browse the Venus Factor forums, you will notice so many women - including veteran members - talking about how they "messed up" and ate too much, or devoured an entire bag of chips, or ate half a cake.

That's what makes this diet program great: it allows room for failure. You're going to mess up. You're going to make mistakes. The important thing is that you don't quit entirely.

Don't give up. Just take everything one day at a time. Set your goals, and try to stick to them. If you don't reach them, keep trying. The fact that you keep going is progress in itself. As long as you don't quit, you'll eventually reach your goal.