Two weeks into my healthy habits and it has been a bit of a disaster. It started out okay, but life has been a bit stressful and the wheels came off – including me eating an entire tub of Ben & Jerrys ice cream in one sitting…
I’m using an app called Nutracheck to record what I’m eating. I’m not really a fan of calorie tracking in general because nutrition is much more complicated than that, but it does make me think more about what I’m eating. Most critically, it makes me think about how much I’m eating.
I have previously used My Fitness Pal too, but I found Nutracheck earlier this year and I find its ease of use and nutrition breakdown to be better. Both apps give a calorie goal, but Nutracheck lets you track other key factors like setting a protein goal. It’s likely they both do this in the paid version, but I only use the free version.
My personal calorie goal is set as 1575 calories per day in the app. The NHS Better Health website advises that women need around 2000kcal per day. Since this would be to maintain weight, the app value feels about right. I will adjust it over time when I see how it goes. The NHS website gives a lot of good advice in this area – definitely worth a look if you haven’t seen it.
The even more controversial part is whether exercise counts or not! For me, I don’t count normal activity to increase my calorie count, but I will include specific exercise e.g. walking more than around 2 miles, taking a class at the gym. It may be wrong, but that’s the approach I’m going with! I’m not going to bombard the blog with numbers, so I’ll just show where I’ve been over and under on my goal for the day.
| Monday | +99 | -85 |
| Tuesday | -126 | +329 |
| Wednesday | +513 | -225 |
| Thursday | -254 | +547 |
| Friday | +503 | +14 |
| Saturday | +756 | -47 |
| Sunday | +501 | -148 |
This reflection has actually been very helpful. That really wasn’t the best start given I was over my calorie goal on 5 of the 7 days for week one! I did a little better with 3 days over my goal in week two. I don’t intend to be hard on myself over this though, Christmas is a stressful time of year and my work has been crazy recently.
I hope this new week will have a little less work stress and allow me to focus a little more on this goal. Wishful thinking, especially since it is so close to Christmas? Very likely!
I’m hoping to add a little exercise in this week. I have been paying for a gym membership for months and strangely, I haven’t lost any weight or gotten any fitter! Not having actually walked through the door might have something to do with it…
I know I need to push myself and that the gym is actually okay when I get started but getting through that door feels like such a massive challenge on it’s own.
Let’s see how it goes…
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