Fitness Tools, Spring 2012

Heather and I are always looking for ways to stay active. Also, as spring starts to get underway, loosing some of the “lay under a blanket and eat comfort food” weight factors into out goals.

Heather got a tip from a coworker about My Fitness Pall and has whole hardheartedly started using it. I can’t necessarily explain what it has that other food-tracking sites don’t except to say that it perfectly fits what she was looking for. One feature I haven’t seen in the tools I played with last spring is that it automatically adds your workouts into your daily caloric budget, so your food log takes into account that you spent an hour on the treadmill.

Now that we have gone most of a month using the site to track both eating and cardio workouts we have learned a few things.

• I need a lot more calories than Heather
• Having more detailed information really allowed us to make small changes that had a big impact
• Heather is happier if she gets a workout in, if for no other reason than to increase her caloric budget a little
• We didn’t realize how many little flaws there were in our generic “try to eat healthy” approach we had

On the first point; it has been a sometimes frustrating transition as meal planning gets a lot more complicated when you have to account for different needs. We have managed fairly well, but it’s been an adjustment.

An easy example of changes we made is breakfast. With the realization that I should probably be eating more, and knowing the whole “it’s better to eat a big breakfast” thing, I more or less doubled the size of the breakfast I eat. It’s been surprising to not have the constant feeling of hunger generally have transitioning into a fitness kick like I am on right now.

Along with the daily workouts, Heather has started working out in the mornings without me. The fact that I am not a morning person hasn’t helped our prior workout plans, and making that change seems to leave everyone happier. (I have been told repeatedly that I am not very nice before 7am… can’t explain it, but it must be true)

Things we didn’t know were quite so bad: Bread, pasta, potatoes. I sort of thought we had that under control by switching to whole wheat. Turns out those guys are surprisingly calorie dense. It isn’t that we don’t eat them now, it’s just that we have to be honest about how fast that stuff adds up. Unexpected good news? Bacon isn’t really that bad! I brought back Saturday morning bacon, and have really enjoyed the discovery 🙂

My only disappointment with My Fitness Pall is that they don’t really do anything with strength training. I started out the year with the resolution that I would get two days of strength training in every week. The site does allow you to record things you do, but with no feedback, it almost felt like they were discouraging you from doing it.

About that time, my sister mentioned a site called Fitocracy. It’s a site that does two things: publishes your workouts, and gives points for doing things, with levels, badges, and achievements. The latter half of that pair is very video game inspired, but that happens to be something that I can get into.

I wasn’t sure how much I would get into it, but after two weeks, it has already motivated me to take my strength training beyond what I could do at home (push-ups, lunges, sit-ups) and into lifting actual weights again.

Hopefully this all translates into some great results. I guess we will know in a few months!

-Jordan

Small tangent that I wanted to mention, but didn’t really fit above: I used a food-tracking website in conjunction with the cardio kickboxing thing we did last year. It didn’t provide any guidance as to how many calories I should be eating, and my ‘coach’ (a well meaning volunteer) didn’t really ether. Long story short, apparently doing an hour of high-intensity workout on 1400 calories a day doesn’t actually produce good long term results when your my size. (for reference, even without a workout, MFP figures I can eat 2100 a day and still loose weight)