Tuesday, January 17, 2012

My Fitness Pal, and Maiden Voyage into the Blogging World!

This is officially my first entry into the TwoSeesters blog and the world of blogging. As I sit here and begin writing, I have butterflies in my stomach from the excitement of sharing the two perspectives of two sisters. My sister and I have dreamed all of our adult lives of something we could do together that would share the similarities and differences of our personalities and be able to help people at the same time. I like to think of us kind of like salty and sweet :-) She is perceived mostly as sweet and I am sometimes perceived as salty. Hey, take it as you will. I think we are a mixture of both :-)

So today marks the first official week completed, using an app on my phone that some of you may be familiar with. My Fitness Pal. Just to get you up to speed, this app allows you to log all of your food intake, as well as how many glasses of water you drink, and how many miles you jog on your treadmill or how many minutes you spend on your elliptical. The clencher is, you can "scan" in any food item that has a barcode to include it in your daily caloric intake. My Fitness Pal takes your calories eaten and deducts the exercise completed for net calories used during that day, based on what your goals are.

This sounds obsessive, and over the top I know...I will be honest, I had just heard of this app the day before I began to use it myself and I had my doubts. I was thinking my friend who told me about it was a little crazy scanning in the barcodes from her salad dressing that night at dinner. But then I sat back, and thought, why not? What do I have to lose? Except hopefully a few pounds.

We had our daughter 19 months ago and I sometimes still look in the mirror and feel as if I look 5 months pregnant. It is no longer acceptable for me to say to myself or others, "Well I just had a baby". No my friends, it has been long enough. I have tried numerous things such as walking, and my elliptical but never changing my eating habits.

You will often hear me say, "I love to cook and bake, and I love food!" This is true. But this past week has opened my eyes to being more creative with my cooking and finding new ways to eat healthy. Which has also helped me create a few new recipes along the way. Now, hold on, it's only been a week but so far this is what I have learned I like about My Fitness Pal:

1) It keeps you accountable
2) It's easier to participate when you have a friend, sibling, neice, parent, brother in law (or all of the above) participating too
3) It helps you to create new healthier ways to eat and to see food differently.

I am not quite ready to share if I have lost weight in this first week, but I will say that it has indefinitely changed my outlook on my goal to get healthy. It has given me an idea of a cooking show I want to do. It has brought me closer to my family and friends.

In the past year, I read a quote that I hope to hold true someday, it goes like this, " Nothing tastes better than thin feels." I am not expecting to drop 100 pounds and come out looking like a super model, but if that happens, I will take the perks that come along with it!

Do with this what you wish, but if you decide to use My Fitness Pal, I am interested on your takes in it as well!

Embrace your Sparkle,

B



Pin It

No comments:

Post a Comment