Friday, November 13, 2009

Daily Plate and Slim in 6

So I've been working hard this week on weight management. I've been tracking calories every day and exercising every day. I haven't seen crazy results yet, but I'm feeling better, more energetic, and just all around better about myself. There have been two tools that have been very instrumental in helping me achieve my goals.

The first is The Daily Plate. It is a part of the Livestrong site. It is a great tool for keeping track of what you have eaten for the day. There is a search bar where you enter what you have eaten. Then you choose the current food item, fill in how many servings you ate, and you can designate what meal or time you ate it. There are lots of different foods. I've found something to match up with everything I've eaten. It is a bit more difficult if you make most of your meals from scratch, but you can find something very similar - at least that has been the case with me. If you eat prepackaged meals/snacks it is extremely easy to find. They also have a feature where you can group items into meals. This is great for my breakfast, since I eat the same thing every morning. That way I don't have to add everything separately every day.

The site also creates a pie graph to let you know where your calories came from, eg. Carbs, protein, fat. There is also a pie graph you can access that shows all the foods you have eaten that day in regards to their calories. So you can see what is making up most of your calories. It also keeps a running total of sodium, fat, carbs, etc and tallies it towards the bottom of the page.

This has been a wonderful tool for me. I keep the website in my tabs at all times, so it is easy to remember to log what I eat. It is also alot easier to skip the high calorie offenders when I know that I will be logging it.

There are also some other tools available. There is a place to enter your weight and some measurements so you can see your progress over time. There are more in depth tools, but they require a paid subscription. I find that there is plenty there without the subscription, which is great for those of us trying to save some cash where ever we can.

So, if you have ever wanted to keep a Food Journal, I would definitely recommend The Daily Plate.


Exercise - shouldn't it be a four letter word? Well at least for me it could be most days. Sure there are days when I can't wait to get moving, but most days, I'd rather sit and do something else. I've found that I do much better when I have a program spelled out for me, rather than just picking something each day. I was using P90X, which is a great program, but it wasn't right for my goals. It really isn't a weight loss program. However, I really like how Beachbody sets up their programs, so I looked in Slim in 6. The premise is that you work out for 6 weeks and slim down. I have heard stories of people radically transforming through this program, but I'm just hoping for a small transformation. I'm about half way through and I'm really loving it. The program starts out with a few days of a 25 minute routine to teach some of the basic moves. Then you move on to the 45 minute routine for about 1.5 weeks. This one definitely harder, but not too bad. Then you do an hour workout for the last 4 weeks. This one is a serious workout, sweating, sore muscles and all that jazz. It's great. Plus when I feel sore, I'm feeling sore in all the places I want to feel sore: thighs, abs, rear. Another feature that I enjoy is that there is always a timer running to let you know how much time is left. I've done other work out tapes where I was constantly looking a clock trying to figure out just how much torture time was left - here they provide it for you. The instructor is upbeat and encouraging, but not sickenly so. I also like that it is an hour of nonstop movement. P90X seemed to have a lot of downtime, even in the cardio workouts - this one just keeps you going.

There are also 3 shorter workouts also, Thin Thighs, Abs, and Flexibility. They are each about 12 minutes long. I do 2 or 3 of those if I'm feeling off and really really don't want to do a full hour.

The downsides: Taking an hour a day can at times be hard to do, but I keep reminding myself that it's worth it. There are some moves that my neck and back don't appreciate. I just take it a little easy on those. I thought I would see better results by now, but I know that I'm just one of those people that is going to have to be very vigilant to lose the weight, that's just how it is. The first couple weeks of the program I didn't watch what I was eating very closely, I'm hoping that by combining the two I will see better results soon.

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