Surviving Fitness

One positive thing about meeting Bambi Rambo was her suggestion to check out a website called The Daily Plate. This site provides a free meal tracking service that calculates your calorie consumption, vitamins, & nutrients of the day. When you join it gives you basic membership and you can do several great things for free. If you want to join one of the support groups, spice up your profile, have meals broken down into categories and track body measurements you need to pay a nominal fee.

So, I checked it out today and signed up for the free service. It only took a couple of minutes. I figure if I like it, I will probably upgrade to the “Gold Membership”level to take advantage of the added services.

One really nice feature is the “calorie calculator”. Based on your age, height, weight and activity level it will tell you how many calories you need to eat in order to reach your goal. You are able to choose how many pounds you would like to gain, lose or maintain per week. Pretty nifty.

According to the calculator, today I need to eat no more than 1,218 cals in order to lose 2 pounds per week. Pretty meager. But, of course, this is based on my current “sedentary to very light exercise” level. Obviously, I could eat more if I expended more calories.

In the end, weight loss is very simple. We all have heard it a million times. The Law of Returns. Like a savings account, If we save more calories than we expend, we gain weight. If we expend more calories than we save, we lose weight. To accelerate the process, we can add some exercise. This burns calories faster If we really want to do it efficiently, also add weight-bearing and strength-training into the mix. This adds the positive return of muscle, which not only helps burn calories longer – it helps us maintain our new weight level.

The principle behind all of this is incredibly simple. The actual practice is amazingly difficult. For me, the challenge is consistency. Keeping at it day after day after day.

This is where some useful motivational or tracking tools come in handy. The Daily Plate seems like a handy one. They even reward you with “points” when you log in every day, and for each activity you regularly participate in. I haven’t discovered yet if you get to redeem your points for some sort of “prize”.

What tools have you found that motivate, track or inspire your fitness? Please share!

Still Surviving – HK

Filed under: calories, Fitness, food, Health Tagged: | calories, daily, eating, exercise, Fitness, fitness tool, food, Health, motivation, plate, smart, strength, Survival, weight-loss