Year of the Diet

Thursday, 21 March 2013

Thursday Weigh-In - 21 March

I'll keep this brief and won't bother with much analysis given it is a Thursday and therefore not my official weigh-in day. But having failed to mount the scales yesterday I found time to do so this morning, and was greeted with this.

Back under 17st

Moving in the right direction then after last week's blip. Good!

Wednesday, 20 March 2013

Wednesday Weigh-In - 20 March

I know you're expecting to see a photo of my toes on bathroom scales. It is Wednesday after all and that means weigh-in day. Lets just say that things are on hold until later as there wasn't the opportunity to get weighed this morning. With two boys in the house you don't expect to have the chance to oversleep, but somehow that is exactly what happened today, leading to a mad rush to get the baby to his neurosurgeon appointment. Got there we did, just about, with the weigh-in and breakfast among many things to get cast aside to ensure that happened.

Rather than wait until next week, I think I'll break my rules and adopt a Thursday weigh-in tomorrow. After a bit of an up and down week I'm feeling pretty confident to have dipped back under 17st, but I just guess we'll have to wait and see.

On the upside, despite a stressful morning I can be proud of myself for turning down cake. A charity sale just went through my office and rather than get something for me, something nice was bought for one of my colleagues. Lucky them and well done me.

Tuesday, 19 March 2013

Every step counts

I'll be perfectly honest. Right now the diet isn't top of my priorities. Living with a 5 week old with nocturnal tendencies rather kicks the stuffing out of you, and getting through the working day without my colleagues finding me snoring away at my desk is becoming more and more of a challenge. Inevitably therefore I am breaking somewhat from the three round meals a day plan and introducing the occasional snack to keep my brain ticking over. However, I've also started taking steps to counterbalance this.

The lunchtime stroll is becoming a regular feature, when the weather permits. To help track progress in this area, I've enlisted the help of an app called RunKeeper. This is essentially a clever bit of kit for fitness freaks to track their runs, but for the less physically actively like myself there is a setting included which covers walking. Enter your weight, and it makes an educated prediction of how many calories you burn in relation to the speed and distance travelled.

What RunKeeper looks like

So, as you'll gather from the image above, today I walked a touch over 2 miles, burning just over 300 calories, all comfortably within the timeframe of my lunch break. Shortly after I finished this I received a nice email from the app informing me I'd broken my record for calories burned and average speed.

Other features in the app include a map tracking your journey, stored details of previous activities and it even has preset training plans to help you prepare for things like 10Ks, marathons etc. I'm not sure it has a plan set up for me and my sponsored walk next month, but if I ever get my running shoes on it will be good to have this option to help me prepare for a race.

I downloaded RunKeeper for free from Google Play and I believe it is also available for iPhone. Check it out as it is a useful addition to your smartphone, and helped me justify eating a few apples this afternoon!