the f-word paradox

For the most part, I am an active person and conscious of what  I eat but I have seemed to have reached a plateau or a stand still and those extra pounds just will not go away. Why can’t I lose weight? I want to blame it on baby weight, lack of sleep, stress, age , metabolism….but in fact, these are excuses, my excuses.

It became obvious that I needed to change things up. I heard about a personal trainer, who is also an internal medicine  physician who has chosen to turn her career path toward preventive health initiatives. I recently met with Tina McInnes of Real Edge Fitness and had an assessment. I was shocked….I was on a trajectory to  heart disease and diabetes and would continue to gain weight,( yup, I was not at a stand still I was actually gaining weight) if I did not make some significant changes. The F-word that came to my mind…. FEAR.

I am now committed to the following plan:

• exercise regularly , incorporate interval training
• minimize wine consumption (2-4 5oz glasses of wine per week… and not in one sitting)
• 1x week training session with Tina, Real Edge Fitness (core, upper body strength, my focus flabby underarms)
• Daily use/input of foods/drink/exercise into MYFitnessPal
• monthly monitoring of MyFitnessPal via Tina aka my conscience

Failure is not an option, I need and will make the necessary changes. Tina introduced me to  MyFitnessPal  which is a free smartphone app and website that tracks diet and exercise to determine optimal caloric intake and nutrients for the users’ goals and uses gamification elements to motivate users. In a consumer reports diet rating, MyFitnessPal was rated the best free program (with 83 points) in overall satisfaction, “maintenance, calorie awareness, and food variety” Wikipedia

I have been using MyFitnessPal for over a week and love it. It is easy to use and it does not lie! For me, my goal is weight loss for health, so I have a certain calorie allowance. I need to make the right food choices in correct portions. I am a lover of wine and it has been a negative contributor towards my health & weight, which now needs to be addressed! So far, I have found this process challenging yet empowering.

To provide you with a better understanding of how MYFitnessPal works the following is from Wikipedia:

The user may enter the name of the food or scan the barcode to find the item in a large database of over 5 million foods or may select foods from a list of most frequently eaten foods.Dietitian Michelle Eckhart says a bonus for dieters using such tools is that “numbers don’t lie, and I think when people can really see the reality — the numbers — it helps them to adjust their behaviors more quickly.” The same food item may contain several variation of the caloric count possibly depending on which country the food item was purchased.

While the application is extremely well designed to make it easy to track your food intake, with a breakdown by food components, the app requires a minimum intake of 1200 calories per day for males  in order to enable full functionality, which limits its use to monitor many diets.

Tracking exercise

MyFitnessPal has different exercises and sometimes the same exercise at different intensities or speeds. The user enters the number of minutes spent exercising and the calories spent is calculated. The calories spent on the exercise is added to the total number of calories that the user should eat per day.

MyFitnessPal can also be linked to a FitBit as well as Jawbone account allowing activity to automatically be calculated into daily calories allowed.

This weight loss journey has now become a priority and a focus for me. I will continue to share my challenges, results and hopefully my success with you. Better health is the optimal goal but I also look forward to feeling better in my clothes and hopefully being able to wear some items that  I have kept “with the hope” that one day I will fit into them again. These garments  aka my now vintage pieces, hopefully, will be incorporated into some  future #OOTD features!