Today, I downloaded a new free app on my phone called Noom that helps you log your exercise and meals/food intake to help you lose weight. I set up my profile and went through a mini-tutorial to get started. I set my weight loss goal even though it's still a little above where I'm probably supposed to be for my height.
Day 1
Based on my weight loss goal, I'm supposed to eat no more than 1200 calories per day. I ate more than that at lunchtime alone! Well, I should say lunch plus a mid-afternoon snack. Breakfast, I did well. Dinner - mediocre to poor. Lunch = horrible! My exercise amount took a lot of my tiny bit of free time today, but I almost met my supposed exercise quota amount for the day.
I've been having a lot of anxiety attacks - lately lasting pretty much all day, but thought maybe more exercise and following a proper weight loss regimen would help. Maybe this wasn't something I should start when I feel so overwhelmed? I find it very time-consuming and confusing to figure out the calories in every little thing I eat, but I know that's what needs to happen in order to get a handle on losing weight. Feeling very discouraged. Noom tries to encourage you, but I'm at a total loss of what to do next.
We've already bought groceries for the week, so I can't go buy a bunch of new groceries. I barely cook (I enjoy baking, but that won't help me here), so that makes things more challenging. I never feel like my lunches are very exciting...I often get pretty bored with them (ever happened to you??)...so what should I put in my lunches?
I'll be turning 30 in a couple of months, which I know means that my metabolism is slowing down even more. I learned from one health & wellness speaker that your metabolism slows down a certain percentage every 10 years, so the older you get, the more important it is to continue resistance exercises - some of these are feasible for me to do with a bad back and some are not, but I do my best.
Based on Day 1, it looks like lunches are my biggest problem - definitely would not have guessed that! As discouraged as I feel, I guess it's a lesson learned. I'm sure dinners could stand some tweaking here and there, but for now, perhaps I should tackle the lunch problem. Part of my difficulty is not having/giving myself enough time to prepare lunches, so I make a sandwich and grab several other items to throw in there to eat during the day - yogurt, 100 calorie packs of wafers and/or cheese crackers, a baggie of grapes (usually), sometimes a Luna bar, etc. Sometimes I only eat 3 items along with my sandwich, sometimes 4. Any suggestions on an inexpensive way to have easy-to-grab-and-go lunches?
My desire is not to make this weight loss thing an idol in my life, but to use it as a tool to help me be a better steward of the body God gave me. I believe that what I eat and how much I eat contributes a great deal to my overall health and well-being. If I can stick with it, I think the Lord has much to teach me about patience, self-control, willpower, and most importantly, relying on Him.
try using the app called My Fitness Pal. It has a huge database of foods that already have the nutritional information pre-populated for you. So it's very easy as it its tracksyour balance for you during the day as you enter what you were eating. It also pre-populates calories you can use up that you earn by doing exercises which are also in the database. I hope this helps but don't get discouraged. love you!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Stephanie! Is My Fitness Pal free too? I'm going to keep using Noom for a little while to see how it works for me, but I'll keep My Fitness Pal in mind in case I want to switch! Noom has a database of foods as well, but if they don't have an item in their database, I can enter it in manually, but then I'm not sure if it saves it... Still learning how to use the app, I guess. It also categorizes food by colors: Green - good, eat the most of this group; Yellow - OK, but eat these foods only moderately; and Red - bad, only eat these foods in very small amounts occasionally. Part of the challenge for me is figuring out how to categorize the food I eat properly if it's not in their database. I hope using the app will get easier with time. Thank you for your encouragement! Love you!
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