There are a number of ways in which you can measure success. When it comes to health and fitness is important that you measure your progress by both healthy new habits and appearance. The most important step of success with health and fitness program is the decline in long-term medical problems, injuries and other health risks while improving the quality of your life either with or without weight loss.

You can also measure the short and medium term changes regularly during the process of health and fitness program. Some changes can clearly be noted in the pattern of health-related behaviors such as decreased need for medication, increased ability to perform physical tasks, reducing fat intake and increase dietary fiber intake of vitamins, and minerals.

Watch closely what you eat:

One way to make major repairs to a healthy lifestyle is to make small changes to how your food is cooked and prepared. You might even see yourself checking labels at the grocery store or find a new taste and texture to food. If you feel good about yourself and know about these changes then you are more likely to continue to make progress with health and fitness program.

A physical way in which you can measure your progress toward healthy appearance is to measure fat distribution through waist circumference and waist hip ration or WHR. Abdominal obesity is most often associated with risk factors such as diabetes and heart disease. This is why you notice any slight reduction in waist circumference or WHR is a good step toward having a healthy distribution of fat in your body, even if you do not actively losing weight.

Body fat can be a good measure of fitness:

Another way that you can use to measure your physical progress is through the measurement of body fat by either hydrostatic weight, electrical impedance, or simply by using skin fold calipers. The latter method is obviously the cheapest method and most easily accessible. However, it is also a less accurate method, but will give you at least a starting point for you to measure your body fat reduction.

No matter how you choose to measure your physical progress, you should not rely on a scale for your indicator. Overall weight you lose the number and pounds do not determine your healthy progress. Your weight is the total combined weight of both lean and fat body weight. Two individuals can have a weight saving while having the same body composition is completely different. One individual may be in better shape than people with exactly the same weight.

Scale A has no way to measure body composition and the actual change that occurred. While the scale may indicate you have lost 7 pounds can not tell you if half of the body weight is muscle and water loss not fat. People also become discouraged when the scale showed that they did not lose weight but in fact they have lost pounds of fat and only replaced with a healthy muscle, firm and fat burning. So consider other methods besides the scale to get the actual size of the health and fitness progress.