New Beginnings

I love the first day of a month. I don't know why, but it always seems like a fresh day to start something new, like a clean slate. Today I made a new beginning and added something new and important to my health and fitness routine. I am counting calories. It sounds easy, but I've decided it's about time I be more mindful of my actual daily caloric intake. I have been pretty diligent about working out 4-5 days a week for the last couple of years, and figured out a long while ago that burning calories through these workouts wasn't enough of a change for me to get to an ideal weight and the older I get, the harder it's getting. I do know that I am in better cardiovascular shape today than I was six years ago, but it's still not enough. Over the last couple of months, I have made efforts to increase my fitness levels even more by adding the running and aiming for 5-7 workouts per week, but it has been challenging getting those few extra workouts scheduled in each week. So the bottom line is that I really need to eliminate more calories from my diet to make the healthy changes that I want. It's not a new revelation for me, but a simple lack of discipline to just do it. Well today is the day I pulled some determination from somewhere within and decided to put myself to task.

Today I started using the Lose It! app on the iPhone that I downloaded months and months ago to create a diet program. I know I've only used it for one day, but I'm pretty excited about this app. It was so easy to set up and start using right away. By entering my current and goal weights and the number of pounds per week I want to lose, the program came up with a daily caloric limit for me. Then I log whatever I eat that day and the app tracks the calories for me. There's a huge database of foods available to choose from or you can customize your foods and enter the nutritional information yourself. So many foods are already in the database though, it's pretty neat. For example, the Lemon Zest Luna bar I ate this morning for breakfast was right there in the Lose It! database and all I had to do was click on it and the basic nutritional information was added to my daily log. Pretty easy!

In addition to logging calories you consume, you can also enter your workouts for that day and those calories burned are subtracted from your daily calories. Just like the food, there are activities already available to choose from, but you can also customize your own workouts and the calories you burn for those activities yourself. Using a heart rate monitor that calculates this during your workout is a great way to get that information.

If nothing else, Lose It! is going to keep me honest with myself about whatever I eat and make me think twice about "cheating." I did have a mid morning and mid afternoon snack today, but I really thought about the quality and quantity of what I was grabbing knowing I was going to have to record it.

If you have an iPhone and want to keep tabs on your calories in and calories burned, check out Lose It! You've got nothing to lose but unwanted pounds! Ha ha. So clever.

For more information about Lose It!, visit iTunes or check out the Lose It! website at http://www.loseit.com/. The site has a lot of different screenshots of the app there that showcase its usefulness. Oh, and did I mention the app is FREE?

As much as you all know by now that I love to talk about running and biking here on my blog, after this post, any diet talk will be over on my little fitness blog that I've been silently maintaining since January. It's called See how she runs... Stop by and visit me there if you're looking for some motivation or inspiration to exercise or if you see me slacking, please get on my case, okay?

If all goes according to plan, and the Lose It! app is as effective as I hope it as at keeping me on task, I will have reached my target weight by December 23, 2010. Wouldn't that be the best Christmas gift I could give myself? :)