I’ve been reading Gretchen Rubin’s book “Better than Before” about building new habits. One of the things she talks about is the strategy of monitoring. Basically it means whatever you monitor, you pay more attention to and you tend to do better at it. The added benefit of this is that it also can help you build other positive habits. I found this to be true for me last year when I decided to start monitoring and writing down my blood sugar each morning. It made me more aware of how what I was eating affected it and led to me starting to eat better which led to my A1C reading going down significantly. (In case you don’t know. A1C is a blood test that checks a 3 month average of your blood sugar levels). This year I’ve carried that over to checking my blood sugar throughout the day and writing it down and recording my food. I realized one thing I always did before when I was monitoring was I over complicated things. I’d want a chart or a special page to record things and then I wouldn’t keep up so I was setting myself up to fail. This time I just got little pocket note books (the little composition notebooks that you can get 3 for $1 at Dollar General) and I’m using those to record my food and my blood sugar. They fit easily in my purse with my diabetic supplies and they’re easy to keep up with. It’s worked like a charm and I’ve done a good job of keeping up with monitoring my food intake and my blood sugar.
Have you ever tried the strategy of monitoring? If so, did you find it helpful? Why or why not?
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