Progressing when taking charge of your arthritis

Monitoring your progress can be incredibly helpful when you take charge of your arthritis. Start with a plan and daily checklist, then as you follow your take-charge plan during the week, gauge whether you've met each day's goals. To do this directly, simply check off the actions you've completed.

Closely following up in this way gives you rapid and helpful feedback.You should congratulate yourself if you've stuck with the plan. But don't be hard on yourself if you've scored some incompletes. Instead, write out the same take-charge plan for the following week and see if you can do better.

You may not be able to detect progress day to day, but an effective plan should produce small improvements each week.

But how should you assess such progress?

You need to step back a bit and regularly take stock of how you're doing. That way, you can assess whether your efforts are making a difference — that they are moving you steadily toward your goal. One way to do this is through the use of "progress points."

In carrying out the actions in your take-charge plan — "walk around the block for a half hour before dinner each night," for example — you achieve the short-term goals that you want to build on, week by week.

Unfortunately, meeting your short-term goals does not mean you're making progress from week to week. You may feel that you're moving forward when actually you're running in place. Using progress points can help overcome this problem.

These points allow you to tell whether your combined actions are working and you are "on course" with your weekly actions.

For an example of progress point system, consider weight loss.

You can lose one pound in a week if they burn 3,500 more calories than he or she takes in. So you could set losing one pound per week as your progress point. To get there you could plan out a low-fat menu and fat-burning exercises that, together, make a 3,500 calorie difference. Then, all you need to do is weigh yourself at the end of the week to see if you've reached your progress point of losing one pound per week.

From there you can easily assess the success of your plan and make any necessary changes.

If you're trying to take charge of your arthritis, then use this advice to help you monitor your progress towards your health goals.