Sunday morning paper with @jeffmurnan (Taken with instagram)
I have another great app to share. You know how most diets suggest you track what you eat, well My Fitness Pal makes this daunting task super simple.
You set your daily caloric intake goal, enter in all of the food and beverage you consume throughout the day, add in any exercise you complete, and submit before you go to bed. You can also set it up so it tracks your weight week to week.
Entering in your food journal could not be easier. There is a bar code scanning feature that allows you to scan the food packaging and then appropriately adjust your serving size. If you don’t have a bar code to scan, just type in what you ate and it will bring up tons of different options to choose from. This little app is seriously smart – remember those McCormicks recipes I was raving about? It found the nutritional info for the same exact meal! It even has a HUGE database of restaurant dishes, so there’s no excuse to leave out those pesky meals.
The tracking on this app is super cool. It shows your nutritional breakdown for the day, week, month, etc. You can also see trends in how you’re eating and how it’s affecting your weight over time. One of my favorite features is when you submit your journal for the day, you get a quick message about how you’ve done. Depending on how well or poorly I behaved that day, it says something along the lines of, “If you ate this way every day, you would loose 3 pounds in the next 30 days.” It’s a good reality check on how my daily food decisions will affect me long-term.
I could go on and on about the neat features of this app, but you really should just try it yourself. For those of you without a smart phone, there is a browser version as well that you can use from your computer.
Hope you enjoy my latest love as much as I do!
J turned me on to a great app for habits – building the good and breaking the bad. It’s the next latest love.
It’s called Way of Life, and the idea is simple: determine the habits you want to build or break and the track your lifestyle choices every day within the journal. When you do something positive (like drinking milk) the entry registers as green, but do something negative (like eat fast food) and the entry registers as red. You can then view your progress over time with a neat trend chart for each category. Tracking choices daily holds me accountable to my decisions. Some say habits take 21 days to make or break – we’ll see if that holds true for me!
Here are a few of the habits I’m working on building:
- Drinking more water
- Drinking milk
- Taking my vitamins (calcium and multi)
- Daily exercise
And some I’m trying to break:
- Drinking soda
- Too much television
- Drinking alcohol
- Stressed out
