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Fitness Tracker Wearables

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FitnessTrackers

As a self-proclaimed geek, I am a big fan of modern technology, and using it to make my life easier. And it’s no different in the realm of weight loss and fitness. I’ve already covered apps you can use to track nutrition and to help you get in some exercise, but let’s talk about tracking that exercise now. Many nutrition apps will also have a way for you to log your fitness, but they tend to be woefully inaccurate. Your current height, weight, metabolism and intensity will all determine how many calories you burn for a given activity, and these vary greatly from person to person. A fitness tracker that incorporates a heart rate monitor can much more accurately determine how much work you did, rather than just give you an average.

I personally have had a FitBit Blaze for about a year now. It has an integrated heart rate monitor. Food that I tracked via the SparkPeople app was synced with my food log on FitBit. The FitBit dashboard would then let me know my calorie surplus or deficit for each day, as well as a running total for the week. When I took this number, divided it by 3500 (the number of calories in a pound) I found that between the watch and my tracking, it was a fairly accurate determination of how much weight I would lose each week.

Now, a recent study shows that people using a fitness tracker lose less weight than those without. These findings may turn you off to a tracker, but I want to address what’s really going on in the human psyche that led to these results. The study compared two groups. Both were told to exercise a certain amount, but one group had the fitness tracker, and the other group did not. The reason those with the tracker lost less weight is due to the feedback of the device. If your goal is to hit 2,000 steps, as soon as the device tells you you’ve hit that number, you’ll quit. If you don’t have that, and you know you have to walk about a mile to get to that number, you might walk a bit extra to be certain you get all those steps in since you have no way of knowing for sure. The thing is, this can also work in reverse. You may look at your tracker and realize you need so many steps to hit a goal and get up and move around some to hit that number.

Personally, both of the above have happened to me. My tracker reminds me to move every hour, and has me try and get 250 steps each hour. It reminds me of this goal 10 minutes before the hour is up if I haven’t met it yet. In the mornings, I will pace while my coffee is brewing to hit that number. But as soon as I do hit that number, I’ll stop. So the tracker does get me to move! I probably wouldn’t pace at all if it wasn’t prodding me to do so. But I also only do the minimum to get that number and then stop. And there’s also the psychology of how close I am. If I only need a few more steps, then I am far more motivated to hit that goal. It’s so close! But if I have a long way to go, if I’ve been sitting all hour doing work and I have to get all 250 steps in during those 10 minutes, I am far more likely to just ignore it. (While writing this, my watch told me I have 201 steps left this hour. That’s probably not going to happen.) (Conversely, this past weekend we spent a day in New York City and did a LOT of walking. When we came home, I realized I was only 1000 steps from getting a new milestone badge for 25K steps walked in a single day, so I had my fiance drop me off a block from home and I walked the rest of the way to hit that goal!)

Another reason that those with a fitness tracker possibly lost less weight is due to the feedback of calories burned. Since the tracker does the logging for you, you know how many calories you burned doing an activity. Seeing this number can make it very tempting to eat back some of those calories.

If you aren’t currently regularly exercising, and getting a wearable motivates you to move more, then getting one is definitely better than not getting one, especially if you tend to get into a zone with your work and forgetting to get up from your  chair all day. (I have been guilty of this at times!)

Also, another very important thing to keep in mind is that fitness wearables are designed to track activity, but diet is the bigger battle in the weight loss war. If your goal is to lose weight, then tracking your nutrition and hitting your calorie/macro/points numbers is way more critical to achieving success.

Nutrition Tracking Apps

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Nutrition Tracking Apps

Tracking what you are doing is the only way to know if what you are doing is actually getting you closer to your goals or not. Logging gives you an accurate picture of what you are consuming. While you can track your food manually using a journal, I have found that using an app is often faster and more convenient.

Apps do the manual work for you

The great thing about using an app is that much of the work is done for you. The apps generally come with a very large database of foods. Look up a food, and all the calories, macros and nutrients are listed for you. No need to do a separate search to find that information. Many apps come with pre-built in graphs as well so that you can get a visual representation of your habits without needing to built a chart on your own. Apps can also give you a big picture view. Many apps that let you track nutrition also let you track your exercise, weight, body fat and even measurements.

Apps making logging food fast and convenient

Aside from coming with a huge food database to make logging quick and easy, apps also come with other features to make getting an accurate picture of your intake as painless as possible. Many allow you to store your own recipes under your profile, so you can easily log foods you make at home. Just input the recipe once, and you can then log that food with one click in the future. Most also include a bar code scanner so that you simply scan the bar code of whatever you are eating and it will find the food and  log it.

Apps can come pre-configured

Many apps have websites associated with them. They can have meal plans on there for you to follow. Just make the foods that they list out for you to stick to the plan. Some can even take into account things like low-carb or vegetarian diets. Plug in your goals, and the app will tell you how much of what you should be eating. I will caution you to calculate your own TDEE using various calculators. For some reason, across the board, apps seem to be really bad at coming up with the right amount for people to eat.

Apps can offer support

Quite a few apps are part of a larger website. These sites often have large communities of people where you can find others with similar goals. There are message boards and groups based on geography, shared interests, and other demographics. This gives you a place you can turn to for support and accountability. (And I’m here for you too!)

Apps that are out there

Here is just a small sampling of apps that you can use to log your nutrition to help keep you on the right track!

What about you? Do you use one of the nutrition trackers listed above? Share your favorite tracker in the comments below!

How and Why to Drink More Water

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How and Why to Drink More Water

While I wish for all of you to have a thirst, zest and zeal for life, unlike that Dos Equis guy, I do NOT want you to stay (literally) thirsty, my friends. Hydration is important!

Quenches your thirst for zero calories

Most of us have a limit to how many calories we should take in each day. Wouldn’t you rather spend those calories on tasty, filling food rather than just a drink? When you’re thirsty, reaching for water can quench your thirst without cutting into your calorie quota for the day. Also, we often have a tendency to forget to count liquid calories. Using high calorie drinks such as soda to quench our thirst often leads to going over our calorie limit for the day.

Regular hydration prevents retention

There are many reasons your body might retain water. Keeping your hydration level constant can help prevent large fluctuations on the scale when your body needs to use more water for sore muscles or digesting large meals. Staying properly hydrated also prevents your body for mistaking thirst for hunger, making you possibly eat more than you should.

Keep water handy

The best way to get more water throughout the day is to keep it close at hand. Buy a water bottle in your favorite color so that you aren’t ever without something to drink. Test out different kinds as well. You might prefer a wide-mouthed bottle, one with a sports cap, or one with a straw. They even make insulated bottles to keep your water cold, bottles with built in filters if your only option is water from a tap, and even bottles with built in infusers so you can flavor your water with fruit. Get the one that works best for you.

Drink up!

Now that you have a water bottle, be sure you use it! You can set a timer and drink a little bit each hour. You can also make a rule for yourself that you won’t have a second cup of coffee until you’ve had half or a full bottle of water. Perhaps you have to drink an entire bottle before lunch. Yes, you will find you will have to pee a lot at first, but just like any other muscle, your bladder will get stronger over time.

I feel like water solves everything. Wanna lose weight- Drink water. Clear skin- Drink water.Tired of your man- Drown him.

Measuring vs Weighing Your Food

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MeasuringvsWeighingYour Food

Weight loss pretty much boils down to eating fewer calories than your body burns in a day. It’s not about just eating some random amount “less” than before, you have to eat below your TDEE. And in order to do that, you have to know how much you are eating. This is where tracking comes into play. The more exact you can be, the quicker you will see results.

The scale of food tracking, from best to worst:

  1. Weighing everything out
  2. Measuring with spoons and cups
  3. Eyeballing it and guessing how much
  4. Basic tracking where you just write down what was eaten, not how much
  5. Not logging anything at all

I’d like to make the case for weighing your food rather than measuring it imprecisely. However, if you have obsessive tendencies, and this will worsen that or trigger an eating disorder, please don’t.

Buy a kitchen scale and USE it

Having a kitchen scale will give you the most accurate picture of how much you are eating. Keep it out on the counter so it is easy to use. You won’t use it if you have to dig it out of a cupboard each time you need it. Get used to using that “tare” button that zeroes out the scale. Need to measure peanut butter for a sandwich? You don’t have to dirty a separate utensil. Just put the plate and bread on the scale, and hit the tare button. Now pick up the bread and spread on the peanut butter. (The scale should go negative) Once your bread is (peanut) buttered, place it back down on the plate, and record the amount. Now you can hit the tare button again, and add more ingredients.

Guessing just leads to frustration

There are countless articles and infographics out there about guesstimating how much food you are eating. Sometimes this is really useful; for example if you are eating at someone else’s house. (Most restaurants these days post their nutrition information online if not right on the menu, so you can just look up the numbers there) But often, these guesses aren’t very clear. How much is a “handful” exactly? Should I be able to completely close my hand around it, or is it as much as I can possibly grab without any more falling through my fingers? And whose hand? I have relatively small hands, does this mean I should grab more? Should someone with larger hands grab less? And what do you do when it tells you that a “serving” of meat is the size of your palm, but doesn’t tell you how many grams or ounces that is?

Weighing is most accurate

You don’t want to be inadvertently consuming more calories than you actually logged. This leads to slower progress, and frustration when the scale doesn’t reflect what you think it should. Certain foods can be difficult to measure. And measuring requires dirtying whatever implement you are using to measure in the first place. With weighing, you can just put things on the plate you are going to use anyway, and just use the tare button to zero out the scale between different items. Weighing also keeps you honest. You might grab a heaping spoonful of peanut butter, and mark it down as 1 teaspoon. Weighing will tell you exactly how many grams it is, regardless of whether that spoon was made by Oneida, Mikasa or IKEA.

Being honest and accurate with your logging is the fastest way to get results.

Making Cooking Easier

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How to Make Cooking Easier

Making the actual cooking of your meals easier is the best way to avoid many of the mistakes that are made when  people try to plan their meals ahead of time.

Make use of easy cooking methods

Whether it’s one-pan oven meals, quick and easy meals on the grill, or my personal favorite, the slow cooker, easy cooking methods make cooking less laborious. Using the oven and the slow cooker might result in longer cooking times, but you don’t have to watch over them or stir. Just set a timer, and when it goes off, dinner is ready. Many grilled dishes take a bit more attention, but they are often done very quickly. Fill out the form below for three of my go-to easy recipes!

Pre-prep what you can

Mornings are often a rush. Even if you plan on making a fairly simple slow cooker dish, chopping up veggies can take time. Do some of that preparing ahead of time. Chop up those veggies and put them in containers or labeled baggies so when the time comes to use them you just have to dump them in. This is also a strategy I use whenever I buy grapes to make sure they get eaten before they turn into raisins. Buy washing them and removing the stems right away, whenever I need a snack, I can just grab a handful and they’re ready to eat. There are many recipes you can find for “freezer meals” where you do all the prep but the cooking, and then freeze the food. The day you want to eat that meal, take it out of the freezer in the morning and put it in the fridge to thaw. Then, that evening, all you have to do is cook. Many of these are even set up for slow cooker meals as well.

Make bigger batches

It can be tough to carve out a big chunk of time to prepare your food, but if you do, then the process of making those meals during the week becomes significantly easier. Take the time to prepare all your lunches for the week, so that during the week it’s just grab-n-go. If you are going to make a marinade, quadruple the recipe, and store the rest in a bottle in the fridge. Next time you make that meal, you already have the marinade made, and can just pour it on to whatever meat or veggies you are making. If you are making a soup or stew, again, double the recipe, and then freeze half of it for a couple weeks later. Multiplying a recipe takes very little extra time now, but will save you a ton of time in the future!

Be sure when freezing things to label what it is and date it! Hopefully these tips will help you stay on course to reaching your goals!

For more tips on making cooking easier, check out my Ultimate Guide to Meal Prep.

Meal Prep Mistakes

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Are you making these meal prepping mistakes-

After taking all that time to plan out your meals for the week, I want to caution you about a few meal prep mistakes I’ve seen others make.

Wasting Food

You need to commit to this meal prepping thing. If you buy food but then when the time comes you don’t follow through and cook it, the food will spoil and you’ll end up just throwing it away and wasting food and money. And then you’ll have to buy something else to eat, which wastes even more money. And it is likely that in the moment, you’ll order take out or make something that’s not as healthy as you would have otherwise.

Trying to be too fancy

One of the ways to avoid wasting food is by NOT getting too fancy with the recipes. Roast leg of lamb with an apricot reduction and a side of zuppa toscana sounds a-maz-ing. But it’s not really practical for an every day dish. Keep your weekday meals simple and quick and you will be far more likely to stick to your plan. See the end of this article for three recipes you can download that are quick and easy to add to your meal rotations.

Not knowing “thine self”

In our household, when we prep our lunches for the week, it’s the exact. same. meal. And it’s the exact same meal for months at a time. In colder months we have steel cut oats with ground turkey. In warmer months it’s salad with grilled chicken. That’s it. Keeping it simple lowers the barrier to preparing those lunches ahead of time. And that works for us. However! If you can’t handle eating the same thing for lunch for months on end, DON’T. Don’t prepare a week’s worth of salads, and then on Wednesday decide you’re sick of them and make a run up to Chipotle instead. If you need some variety, try making extra food when you make your dinners so you can have enough left over for lunches during the week.

Keep a backup meal handy

Even the best laid plan only lasts until the first arrow leaves the bow. Maybe despite the planning, you forgot a critical ingredient. Or perhaps due to traffic you are running late and don’t have time to cook the meal you had previously planned on. Or you’re just having a horrible day and spending time cooking is NOT what you want to do. This is when having a backup meal is really handy. A backup meal should be something that you can cook up quickly, but also lasts a decent amount of time should you not need it right away. On days we are “not feeling it”, we turn to chicken sausage that we heat up on our Foreman Grill. Just grill them up for a bit, and eat with ketchup. Not the healthiest meal in terms of micronutrients, but because it is chicken, it’s lower in fat than bratwurst, and much lower in calories. Still super delicious and satisfying though!

Hopefully these tips can help you stick to your meal plan. Don’t forget to download your free recipes!

For more tips on avoiding meal prep mistakes, check out my Ultimate Guide to Meal Prep.