Day 20 - Hot, sweaty, and kinda anxious...

Hello everyone!

I haven't updated for a couple days. I didn't stop for any reason in particular... Just nothing special to really note. I worked all week. I stayed at or below my calories for all 3 days and 2 of the 3 days I did some kind of exercise. Not a ton of exercise, mind you. But anything is better than nothing!

I feel like I have a bunch of things I wanna talk about! Let's see if I can organize them into coherent thoughts...

For you calorie counters out there... I have fallen head over heels for an app I have had forever and only just recently started using. It's called "Lose It!" I have an iPhone, so I know it's available for the Apple devices, Android I'm not so sure. But it's definitely worth a look! At first, it seems like a run-of-the-mill food logger. However, it has so many features I just adore.

First, you can set up a weight loss program. So I put in my sex, age, weight, height, and my goal weight. Then it asked me how much  I want to lose per week. Then it calculates an estimated goal completion date based on all the info. It gives you the number of calories you should eat per day to achieve your goal.

Next, it keeps track of your calories every day, shows you where you are in reference to your daily calories goals with a little bar graph. I'm going to attach a screen shot, since it's sooo cool and all.

The thing I love, is the ease it makes logging food. If you are eating fresh foods, then obviously you just search for the food in their HUGE database and enter how much of the food you ate. But! If you are eating ANYTHING with a barcode, all you do is scan the bar code and it instantly recognizes the food, as well as the entire nutritional info and how much is in each serving. It makes logging in a meal as easy as taking a picture of a bar code. Pretty much amazing.

You can also input exercise and it keeps track of that in your daily food log as well.

For those of you interested in things other than calories, it keeps and daily tally and weekly average of all your nutrients. I like to watch my fiber, carbs and sodium as well.

And of course, a fitness app isn't complete without a weight tracker. You can track your weight as often as you like and it plots it on a line graph for you. Which I also love.

OMG INSERTING PHOTOS IS ENTIRELY TOO HEAD-ACHY!

Now... I apologize for the crappy quality. But I saved them as gif's and this is what I got. I just wanted to share my awesome APP with all of you. I really do love it.

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Now... back to talking about things. I also dusted off the ol' elliptical today. I know, I haven't mentioned it. I have a home-elliptical in the corner of my living room that I hadn't used in months. It's a shame, I know. And for a long time, including just recently, it has made me feel worthless and lazy when I looked at it. So tonight I decided to do something about that! And I hopped on it. For exactly 16 minutes. That was about all I could do. It was on medium intensity. But it certainly worked me out. According to my app and the elliptical I burnt around 230 calories in 16 minutes. That makes me really happy. I'm sweating up a storm right now, too.

I never use exercise as an excuse to eat more though. That's one thing I don't like about this app. I think I want to stay under 1500 (usually more like 1350) AND exercise. It doesn't make sense to me to eat more because I've exercised. Then, what's the point?

Tomorrow is my weigh day and I am SO anxious. I try not to get so excited... on the chance I don't change or god forbid GAIN! But I wanna see those numbers go doooown! Hopefully tomorrow is the day for that! (:

Also, and  it may be in my head, my work clothes are starting to feel just a teeny-tiny bit looser. It could be in my head, but either way it's very encouraging and makes me wanna keep going.

I'm a little more scattered brained than I originally thought. I can't think of a single thing I wanted to talk about. Geez... Brain fart. Oh well. I'll think of it later and I'll definitely include it tomorrow with my weigh in. Which I'm hoping *fingers crossed* will be down. 2 pounds would be incredible.

OH! I remember... This is what happens when I get bored, and thinking about my weight, and have access to Excel. Observe:

Oh geez. It's tiny. Click on it. I think that remedies the problem.

I don't know if I'm setting myself up to fail, or if this is a good, goal setting, motivational tool. But... but enjoyed making it. And it's pretty sweet, IMHO. (;

Okay. I'm done for the night. Time for a shower and a little How I Met Your Mother on Netflix!

Here's to hard work and determination,

-E