Regardless of the stage you’re at of your weight loss journey, you should always have the end goal in mind. Remaining focused on your goal is crucial to staying on track; sometimes it can be difficult to keep going, but you can do it!
While you’re on your journey to losing weight, taking photos is a great way to keep motivated and stay up to date with your progress. Simply relying on the scales to track your progress can be misleading, and, at times, disheartening.
Read on to learn more about taking before and after photos and how this simple weight loss tip can help you stay on track and achieve your goals…
How to Take a Before Photo
To see the changes in your shape as you progress on your journey, it’s best to have a starting photo wearing activewear or swimwear to show off your shape. Although this may be daunting at first, showing your stomach area in pictures is a valuable way of highlighting all the progress you’re making.
How to Take Progress Pictures
1. Always Wear the Same Clothes
When you’re losing weight, it’s natural to be proud of your progress, and who can blame you? You’re doing a magnificent job! To really emphasise how far you’ve come in your before and after photos, we encourage you to wear the same clothes – over time, you’ll start to notice how baggy and oversized they become as your weight comes down.
2. Take Pictures at the Same Time of Day
While your weight will reduce as your hard work pays off, your body weight and shape can fluctuate over the course of the day, so it’s important to take your before and after photos at the same time of day for the best results.
You also need to leave the same timeframe between your progress pictures – your results will not be consistent if you’re taking pictures a week apart and then the next one a month later.
We recommend leaving fortnightly or four-week intervals between each progress picture. This gives you a reasonable amount of time to lose weight, see the changes, and keep motivated.
Another factor to consider is the light – poor or artificial lighting can affect the quality of pictures, which can make it harder to compare your before and after photos.
3. Use the Same Background
As well as wearing the same clothes and taking your pictures at the same time of day, you should try to take the pictures in front of the same background to keep the photos consistent with each other and highlight all the exceptional progress you’re making.
This will make comparing the pictures much easier too – if you’re standing a little closer to the camera in one picture than another, it might be harder to figure out how much progress you’ve actually made.
4. Take Full-Length Pictures
To fully understand how well you’re doing on your weight loss journey, you need to see your whole body.
If, for example, you’re doing a lot of walking, you may notice your legs are becoming more toned. Also, it’s hard to determine where you will lose weight from, so to really get the best idea of how you’re progressing, you need to see your whole body. To do this, get pictures of your whole body from the front, back and side.
How to Take Your After Photo
If you’re ready to take your after photo – congratulations!
After all your hard work, it’s time to make the most of it – treat yourself to a new outfit, get your hair or make-up done to show off how far you’ve come and emphasise the significant difference between your before and after pictures.
When taking your after photo, you may want to consider wearing an outfit that you would’ve worn at the start of your weight loss journey. When you do this, it helps emphasise how much your body has changed. For example, this could be you holding out your old jeans to show just how much extra room there is now.
If you’re still on your weight loss journey, then keep it up – you’re doing a fantastic job and you’ll soon be taking your after photo.
Whether you’re at the start or end of your weight loss journey, or somewhere in between, OPTIFAST’s weight loss plans can help you lose weight and maintain your target weight. Discover a weight loss plan that works for you.
Find out everything you need to know before starting an OPTIFAST weight loss plan:
