Hello, friends.
Last night I decided to make a one time change to my weekly exercise routine. Usually Wednesday night is my “yoga with Jim” night, but since he is on vacation for two weeks I decided to try something else.
I went for a spinning class with Lisa at 5:15 PM. I had been to her class once before when she was teaching one of the alternating instructors class on a Saturday, and I remember coming home after her class being totally beat and saying to my husband that it had been the hardest class I ever took. Now that was in the very beginning of my spinning journey. Last night I thought to myself: “It can’t be that bad this time. I’ve been doing it for a while and I am in a lot better shape now”. But…once again – Lisa wins the award for the Hardest Spinning Class that Almost Killed Lena. Besides, I set my personal record of 780 calories burnt in an hour!!!
I am seriously considering including this class into my weekly routine! Well, this Saturday Lisa is teaching again, so I will have my portion of the “monster spinning” .
I came home tired, happy, drenched in sweat and hungry. My husband was still at work, it was too late to start cooking, so when he got home we decided to go out to eat. The choice was Applebee’s and I had their wonderful Roasted Garlic Sirloin:
I haven’t mentioned it yet, but when I started “exercising like crazy” (c) Carmen, it naturally lead me to thinking about improving my diet (otherwise, why even bother exercising, right?). So I started looking for online tools to help me eat better by tracking what I eat, how much I eat, how much nutrition I get from what I eat, etc.
I came across a wonderful website called Lose it! Basically, it is a calorie counter – you set your parameters (current weight, age, height, how many pounds you want to lose per week, etc), set your goal weight and it calculates your daily calorie budget, i.e. how much you can eat per day.
You then eat and log your meals trying to stay within your budget. You also log your exercise, and the calories burnt get deducted from your daily amount of calories consumed.
The wonderful things about this tool are:
- They have a huge database of foods you can search when you log your meals;
- You can search by the brand name or by the food name;
- They have a huge database of restaurant foods. What I do sometimes – before going out to eat I look at the list of menu items for the place we’re going to on Lose it! and get an idea what’s in their food (nutrition, calories, etc);
- They have a great mobile app which allows you to scan bar codes for the food you eat now that is the quickest way of logging your meals!
I know that a lot of people think of this kind of routine as torturous, time consuming and inefficient. I am NOT one of them. When I first started doing this, I had to remind myself to log meals, now it is just automatic and I plan my meals for the day in the morning and adjust the daily log in the evening if I suddenly feel like eating a chocolate bar I wasn’t planning to eat 🙂
Besides, it really helped me understand the nutritional value of different foods. To put it simple – instead of eating a high calorie nut bar (which I know now is full of sugar and other stuff I don’t want in my body), I choose a bunch of fruit/nuts for a snack.
Think about it as making educated healthy food choices rather than restrictions.
You don’t have to use it every day for the rest of your life – it is just a good educational and self-discipline tool. Just challenge yourself to keep track of what you eat, stay within the daily calorie budget, don’t eat “empty” foods (high calorie and low nutrition value) and enjoy the results!
On an unrelated note: I won a hat from our local YMCA yesterday 🙂 Every Wednesday they have a contest on Facebook where they post a very-very-very close-up picture of an item from the YMCA and ask their members to guess what it is. Of course I recognized a part of the spin bike:
Stay fit, my friends, and have a great Thursday!
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