The right attitude probably doesn't hurt either.
Tonight was a turning point for me. I've been doing really poorly at tracking. I mean really bad. Mostly because I didn't want to have to calculate the points on everything I ate since I find it time consuming and a little frustrating not to be able to eye ball something and tell right off the bat if it's a good investment or not. I live on the go!
So Saturday night when I found myself in my shower leaning against the wall in a fit of sobs because I felt hopeless and I knew I had had another week where I would gain weight, I knew something had to change.
So I found another app. It's called My Fitness Pal. It's a free app. It can also be used exclusively online. With no monthly (or any kind) of fee to use. That allows you to work offline and doesn't limit your functionality...terribly. It also tracks weight, measurements, and all different kinds of nutrient facts. It sets a goal amount of each nutrient per day (fat, fiber, potassium, Vitamin A, C, carbs, sugar, etc.) and you can look at where you are during the day in relation to those goals. For instance, I know I don't eat anywhere near enough Potassium or Vitamin A or C and I eat too much fat, carbs, and sugars. Go figure. But I didn't know that before! Those pieces of information are just as important as how much of what I've consumed!
I've also gone to tracking my weight daily. It's an interesting experiment. I weigh every morning and log it in my app. And yes, I know that weight can fluctuate from day to day. It's interesting for me to see what daily choices I make effect (or is it affect? I can never remember, but I digress) not only my weight, but how I feel.
Something I've also noticed about this app is it has a networking component in it. You can find friends and see their updates. So even though I don't have any "friends" on the site, when I lose weight, it posts. When I exercise, it posts. When I finish a day of logging food and exercise, I complete my entry, and it makes a post and either just says that I completed a log, or if I came in even 1 calorie under my goal, it says I came in under my goal. And that's nice to see. I can see the posts it makes about me, so I want it to make as many good feeling posts as possible, so my goal is to come in under my goal, even if by 1 calorie.
When I complete a daily entry of food and exercise it comes up with a screen that shows me approximately where I will be weight-wise in 5 weeks if every day was like today. I understand it's not to be taken as written in stone, as there are many factors, however, it's a fantastic motivator to see that if I work hard, I can actually see a concrete lower number on the scale over time. CONCRETE. That's huge!!
For exercise, once you find the exercise, you plug the minutes, and it calculates the calories automatically. No need to perform any calculations. Just plug in minutes.
Now back to my turning point. In the app, I've been logging everything since Sunday. I've come in under goal each day so far. So today, at dinner, I had a Mike's hard lemonade. That clocks about 220 calories, and used up my calories (after dinner of course) and I had 19 left. So I decided I would skip ice cream, and treat my alcohol as dessert. Good choice right? Then I was watching TV and feeling sad that I didn't get dessert, so I got the twizzler bites out and had a serving (which turns out to have finished the bag). Then I'm logging my dessert and toning down the serving to fit in my remaining calories. To fit under 19 calories, turns out instead of 17 twizzler bites, I ate 2.5. Yea right. So I struggle with myself and log the whole thing, which puts me more than 100 calories over my goal. Yikes! I won't get my blurb saying I was under goal! So I start playing with exercise numbers to see how long I would need to walk to burn off those twizzler bites. 30 minutes. Groan, those twizzlers SO weren't worth it!
So I hop to it, get on the treadmill for a grueling 45 minutes at 3 mph (20 minute mile), which by the way was a lot harder than it really should have been. I burn 224 calories, come out on top, and am drenched and dripping with sweat. It was a good feeling.
I don't think I'll have any issues moving the scale this week, but even if I don't, I've definitely achieved a non-scale VICTORY!!!
Until next time,
:)
