An app or a wristband isn't on its own going to make you any fitter, and I've always avoided them through fear that it would be just the same as being a member of a gym and not going. Something that like many others I've done.
Anyway, a bit of back story. Last year I took up regular cycling during the spring and summer, twice a week covering a distance of around 22 km. Often with my two eldest children. Not amazing I'm sure but a big step up from the activity I've been doing for the last few years. Then winter came and the idea of cycling that far in the dark lost its appeal. The fun went out of it.
Following a few months of inactivity, I decided to give running a go, again with my eldest children. The advantage being we didn't need to have three sets of working bike lights and neither need we need to risk our necks on the winter roads.
The running is good, and I continue it now, but often it is cold or raining, or there's a school or work event getting in the way. So the regularity just isn't there.
Big decision
Not only have I been sceptical of fitness apps, but I've always been sceptical of diets as well. I would rather eat what I like and exercise rather than eat virtually nothing and not exercise. But being about a stone and a half overweight according to the NHS BMI calculator (featured below), I decided it was time to make some changes.
I started the year by dropping tea and coffee, because it was just providing me with an excuse to put off starting each piece of work I had to complete during the day and allowing me to exist in an unproductive fog. Removing these caffeinated drinks and drinking water instead, I was easily hitting eight cups of water in a day (the recommended average).
The other thing I dropped was all snack foods: crisps, chocolate and so on. I also stopped second helpings, cakes and puddings.
At the same time I decided to heed the advice that losing weight requires not only dieting but exercise as well. And I admitted to myself that the irregularity of the run just wasn't providing what I needed. So I started making time for 20 mins aerobic exercise in the morning and 20 mins at night (the latter being often with the children). I pieced this exercise together from past knowledge with the main aim of simply keeping going for the entire time. Mainly running on the spot, broken up with stomach curls, press ups, and so on. All at my own speed, gradually increasing the intensity as I improve.
Taking its time
As you quickly learn, dieting is not something you do for a week and then go back to normal. You are looking at a commitment of 12 weeks on average and you expect to lose 1 or 2 lbs per week. And this is where the apps come in. If you are dieting and exercising but every day you step on the scales and nothing has changed (as is normal), or it has changed very little, then the apps provide you with knowledge that you are doing the right thing, taking in the right number of calories and exercising an adequate amount.The apps
The main benefit of Google Fit is that it is on all the time, monitoring your activity, so I tend to feed the walking information from this into MyFitnessPal. And it is MyFitnessPal that I've placed at the centre of my attempts to lose weight. Primarily because it logs your food and your exercise and tells you how many calories you have eaten under or over your daily allowance (taking into account the amount of weight you wish to loose).Using MyFitnessPal there have been some eye opening moments:
(1) there's over 300 calories in a supermarket naan bread, and you'd be better off sticking with rice (even if it's white)Other choices are more predictable (for me anyway) in their results. For example, I was congratulated for the Vitamin C in tomatoes.
(2) the muesli I'd been eating was high in saturated fat (whereas Alpen, for example, isn't)
(3) eating a piece of brie results in a thumbs up for the calcium (while Extra Strong Cheddar gets a thumbs down for its saturated fat)
It is not only logging the results that is useful, therefore, but you are also educated about the nutritional value of food alongside the calories which helps in making healthy choices in the future.
Note: If your food comes in packaging of some form then you can scan it with MyFitnessApp, you can also enter ingredients one by one, create your own recipes to reuse or choose a meal from a list, e.g. Homemade Veggie Roast. In addition to this you'll also find the calories for menu items from popular restaurants, e.g. Prezzo.
MapMyRun
The benefits of MapMyRun are that you can, as the name suggests, accurately plot a route for your run and see the exact distance, as well as height gain.I'd been running a route that I only roughly knew the distance for and MapMyRun was able to tell me it was 4 km and I could using their website to work out a way to add a further kilometre to extend it to 5 km, and have the route download to my mobile. And once a run is complete I can feed the data into MyFitnessPal.
Conclusion
It sounds like a lot of recording of information and effort, but it is good if you are serious about losing weight to know where you've gone over or under your calorie allowances, and to have this broken down into carbohydrates, fat and protein. It also records your vitamins and provides you with guidance for sticking at a diet rather being haphazard.
Whether it works, you'll find out for sure in February/March time.
Comments
Post a Comment