Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Thanksgiving was definitely different

For Thanksgiving dinner we had 13 people. We have China for 12. So we put a salad plate at my setting. After passing around the food my smaller plate still looked rather empty, and when I was full there was still food on the plate.

That's good and bad. Mostly good. I ate slowly, thoroughly enjoyed every bite and didn't feel hungry. I do have to admit a big part of me (no pun intended but appropriate all the same) wished very badly that I had more room for food as some of it just tasted soooooooo good that I didn't want to stop. Thus the big part of me is probably much of the reason it's a big me, eh?

Now the nice thing was being able to go back later to eat. I couldn't eat as much but I could eat more often and not feel stuffed to the gills. And here it is Tuesday after and I'm already down. Total today: 318.

I find myself wondering if I can make 300 by January 1. I don't know if that would be pushing it too much or burning myself out. I think it's doable given a lot of exercise.

I've written before about being able to track exercise with my phone in the past. I just switched phones recently and have an Epic, one of those android phones. I LOVE LOVE LOVE that phone!!! Anyway, there are a ton of free applications out there for the phone, and there are many of them that are perfect for getting you going on exercise. A fantastic free application is one called Cardiotrainer. If you have an android phone, I highly recommend it.

Cardiotrainer does a number of things. It will track your exercises including measuring your walks or runs. It calculates the calories you burn and tracks those for you. It posts a little medallion on the home page of your phone telling you how many calories you've burned today. It will post your workouts over to Google Health, and will post them to your facebook page if you wish. It even tell you how you rank in miles compared to others using the application. At one point I was in the top 500 out of nearly 600,000 people.

There's a cute little widget they put out at Thanksgiving. It's a picture of a turkey that posts on your phone screen. You have 3000 calories to work off. As you burn calories pieces of the turkey disappear, and then when you've burned all 3000 calories there's nothing but bones left on the picture. It's a clever little motivation thing.

One thing that comes with having lost weight is that I feel more like getting out and walking. As I ride the light rail and bus to and from work, when I am coming home many nights instead of catching the bus from the nearest light rail station I decide to walk the 3 miles home. It all depends on how early I have to get up or how cold, not to mention how far away the bus is. It started with having half hour waits for the bus and deciding that if I have to be outside waiting anyway, I might as well use that time walking. Then I realized that with a good pace I could do the walk in 45 minutes (or wait 30 minutes and ride for 5-10). Some nasty weather nights have cut into that a bit, but today is nice and sunny.

And, it's about time to go to work. My phone and Cardiotrainer app await!

No comments:

Post a Comment