How to Hold Yourself Accountable for Weight Loss While Staying on Track
When it comes to achieving any goal, including weight loss, accountability plays a powerful role in your journey. Cooking healthy meals and exercising on a consistent basis is challenging enough, especially when you’re not feeling motivated. Holding yourself accountable or having an external source of accountability is key to successfully losing weight.
Weight loss accountability is essential for lasting success. In this article, we’ll explore effective strategies to help you stay accountable, not just for today but consistently throughout your journey.
Keep reading to discover practical tips that will keep you on track toward your goals every step of the way.
What Is Accountability in Weight Loss?
Before we get started, I think it’s important to answer a crucial question – What exactly is accountability, and how can it help with weight loss?
In simple terms, accountability means showing up and setting out to accomplish the things you said you would do. In other words, it means following through with the commitments you made to yourself (and/or to others).
Accountability can be a powerful tool for all of us, but it’s important to use it in the correct ways. Instead of using accountability to “shame” yourself or “guilt” yourself into taking action, try using accountability as a supportive, empowering tool to help you reach your goals, such as achieving confidence in your own body.
Now that we’ve defined accountability, let’s dive in and learn how accountability can help you on your weight loss journey!
How Does Accountability Help for Weight Loss?
Let’s be honest, it’s 2025 as I write this article and right now, we all have so many competing priorities that are demanding our attention. Between work stresses and personal lives, it can be hard to find the energy to prioritize the actions that are necessary to lose weight.
When it comes to losing weight, accountability can look different for everyone. Some people find it beneficial to track their food intake, either by using a calorie-counting app like MyFitnessPal or by using a written or digital food journal. Others find it useful to have someone else hold them accountable to their goals, either via in-person conversations, text messaging, phone calls, or emails. In my experience as an online weight loss coach, acting as an accountability coach for our clients is one of the best benefits of coaching with us!
Whether you find it useful to have an app or another person help to hold you accountable, accountability helps in numerous ways while trying to lose weight:
Consistency ♾️
Accountability encourages you to be more consistent with your actions. Being real with you – I talk to SO many people on consultation calls who tell me, “I know exactly what I need to do to lose weight and become healthier. However, I just need someone to help ensure I do those things!” As humans, we are much more likely to take action and reach our goals when there is another person invested in our goals.
Persistence 🧱
Having an accountability buddy helps when it’s time to navigate challenges and setbacks. You and I both know that losing weight isn’t easy, and even with the best intentions and plans, life has a funny way of throwing us all curveballs when we least expect them. When setbacks happen or when challenges arise, it’s helpful to have another person (whether that be a coach or a loved one) that you can share your struggles with, while navigating how to navigate the challenge.
Self-awareness 🧘
Next up, accountability helps to improve self-awareness. This is a crucial step on a weight loss journey, because it ensures that you lose weight and keep it off long-term! Having either a person hold you accountable or internal sources of accountability (like food journaling or using an app) helps you become more aware of your habits and choices. It also helps you understand your own patterns in emotional eating, stress-related cravings, or certain situations that lead to unhealthy choices.
Follow-through 🏃
Finally, accountability helps to bridge the gap between your intentions and your actions. Truth bomb time: Many of us have great intentions but struggle to follow through with the actions we need to take to reach our goals. Having an internal or external source of accountability allows you to improve your “say-do” ratio. In other words, having someone or something that can help you plan ahead improves the chances that you take the actions needed to successfully reach your goals.
Choosing the Right Accountability Partner for Weight Loss
Having someone else help to hold you accountable to your goals is invaluable. In fact, A study by the Association for Talent Development suggests that individuals who have an accountability appointment with a committed coach or partner have a 95% chance of achieving their goals.
There are many people you can choose from to help keep you accountable for your weight loss goals. You can choose your significant other, a close friend or family member (such as your sister or your mom,) or an in-person or virtual weight management support group. You can also choose someone who specializes in weight loss and has the knowledge and expertise to help you troubleshoot challenges and celebrate successes. Friendly reminder 😉 – This is exactly what we do in our online weight loss coaching programs.
What’s most important is that you choose an accountability partner who you can trust and be honest with. If you’re feeling stuck, ask yourself these questions about the person you are considering to be your accountability partner:
✅ Does this person support me and my goals without judgment or shame?
A good accountability partner should encourage you and ask tough questions (at times), but in a proactive way instead of shaming or criticizing you for setbacks.
✅ Is this person reliable and consistent?
Accountability won’t help you reach your goals if it’s sporadic or unpredictable. Try to choose a person who is reliable and can consistently check in with you to discuss setbacks and successes.
✅ Does this person understand and/or respect your approach to weight loss?
There are literally thousands of diets, programs, and strategies that you can use to lose weight. Choose an accountability buddy whose philosophies around nutrition, fitness, stress management, sleep, and overall health align with your own beliefs strategies.
✅ Can this person provide both encouragement and tough love when needed?
The best accountability partners are the ones who can be honest with you 100% of the time. Sometimes the people who love you the most aren’t the best accountability partners for your weight loss journey because it adds strain to your relationship when they are required to have tough conversations with you. Choose someone who can be honest with you and have tough conversations when needed.
✅ Are you comfortable being open and honest with this person?
Accountability only works if you can be fully transparent with your accountability partner. From setbacks to successes to struggles, choosing someone without fear of judgement or embarrassment is key.
Ultimately, there is no right or wrong answer in regard to the best person to help you achieve your weight loss goals. For some people, it will be a close family member or friend. For others, it will be an independent professional (like a doctor, coach, etc.) who is fully vested in your weight loss journey. What matters most is that the person will be there for you through the inevitable highs and lows of a weight loss journey.
How to Keep Yourself Accountable for Weight Loss
As wonderful as it is to have an accountability partner, ultimately, the goal is for you to hold yourself accountable! At Strong with Sarah, it’s never our goal to keep clients for years and years because they rely on us to maintain their weight loss. Our goal is to teach our clients the habits and skills necessary to lose weight AND maintain their results on their own long-term. That means learning the skills to exercise and eat healthy meals (most of the time) that you can do (without telling anyone else) for the next 5 months and 5 years!
There are many tools and strategies that you can use to become more accountable to yourself. Here are 3 of my favorite ways to become more self-accountable:
1️⃣ Set Clear, Measurable, Action-Based Goals
I would guess that if you’ve made it to this point in the blog post, your goal is to lose weight! Good for you - that’s a great goal to have! Here’s the downside to that goal – No matter how hard we try, the number on the scale is outside of our control. For example, I could eat kale salads for every single meal for a month (that sounds miserable 🤢), and there would be no guarantee that I would lose 10 pounds. I might lose 2 pounds if I tried that, or I might lose 18 pounds, or I might not lose any weight at all if I’m drenching the salad in calorically-dense toppings and dressing.
Instead of focusing on an outcome goal like your weight, a great way to build self-accountability is to create clear, measurable, action-based goals that will lead to weight loss. Here are some examples:
I will meal prep 3 dinners this week
I will eat two fruits or vegetables every day for the next two weeks
I will complete three 20-minute workouts this week
I will drink 96 ounces of water every day this week
I will reach 10,000 steps 5 days this week
All of these actions are clear, concise, and can easily be measured. Even better, when they are done consistently enough to create a calorie deficit, they help you lose weight!
2️⃣ Track Your Progress (Both in Terms of Actions and Results!)
As I’ve already mentioned in this article, awareness is key to self-accountability. Without data, it’s nearly impossible to be fully aware of what you’re doing and what to change (especially if you’re not losing weight!)
Tracking progress, both for actions and for results, can look different for everyone, depending on what feels good to you! Check out some of my favorite ways to track actions and results:
Keep a paper-and-pen food journal in your kitchen and write down everything you eat
Track Calories and Macros in an app like MyFitnessPal
Track your weight every other day and notice the trends and fluctuations
Take Progress Photos and/or measurements every other Saturday
Create a habit-tracking spreadsheet where you can check off daily habits once completed (such as drinking water or exercising)
Use an app that can track habits and set reminders to complete your habit(s)
When you have accurate data about your current habits and results, it becomes easier to make adjustments and changes if you need to navigate a challenge or if you hit a weight loss plateau. For example, if you’ve been tracking calories/macros and if you notice that consuming 1900 calories per day with 80 grams of protein isn’t leading to weight loss, you can make adjustments from there.
3️⃣ Identify and Address Emotional Triggers
When many of us are stressed, bored, or emotional, we turn to food to help cope with unpleasant emotions. This is natural – as humans, we like being happy and feeling good, and we don’t enjoy feeling all of the icky emotions that come along with life at times. Sweet and/or salty foods often give us that feel-good dopamine hit, which allows us TO feel good for the 30 seconds we are initially chewing the food. However, emotional eating can often sabotage our goals.
The ultimate question – How do you deal with unpleasant feelings instead of using food? Here are some of my favorite strategies:
Take 5 deep breaths before taking a bite of anything! Ask yourself – “Am I eating because my body needs nourishment, or am I using food to cope with an unpleasant feeling?
Jot down your thoughts and feelings. This doesn’t need to be a fancy or formal “journaling session” unless you want it to. Sometimes, simply writing down our feelings can help them pass without needing food.
Engage in a non-food-related activity. Some of my favorite de-stressors (outside of food) include listening to my favorite song on Spotify, playing a round of Candy Crush on my phone, or reading a paragraph in my favorite fiction novel.
Reach out to a friend, coach, therapist, or support group. Chatting through unpleasant emotions with someone you trust can help you process them, without using food.
Remember, when it comes to processing stress, boredom, and other unpleasant emotions without food, there are no “right” or “wrong” answers. Experiment with what works for you!
FAQ: Accountability and Weight Loss
Putting Everything Together
In conclusion, I want to remind you that there are hundreds of ways that you can stay accountable to your weight loss goals. From external support from another human, to logging your own calories and tracking your workouts in your calendar, there are no “wrong ways” to add accountability into your life. Remember that what works for your sister, or your best friend, or your mom might NOT be the best form of accountability for you!