Bad Blogger

I think I started out with a vague goal of posting something about once a week. Yeah...

My workouts have been fairly consistent. Getting up to 25-30 minute runs of varying speed in the C25k program. Still making it to weekly yoga and strength (Body Conditioning) classes. 1 or 2 days rest in a typical week. Sort of suffering from the winter blahs though. My eating has been ok, but my tracking of said eating has fallen a bit by the wayside. 

Just typing that makes me want to log into my Bodybugg software and put in the 2 pieces of wheat toast I ate for breakfast today. At least I've been wearing the Bodybugg gizmo on my arm and meeting my activity goals most days. The contraption works on the basis of calorie deficit. Mine is currently set for a 500 calorie daily deficit. My caloric intake goal is 1900 and my caloric Burn goal is 2400. (I also have a 10,000 daily Step goal and a 60 minute daily Activity goal.)  There is a watch that syncs with the armband and beeps with a happy little message when you meet each of your set goals. The cool thing I have been monitoring is the breakdown of the physical activity after I sync it up on my laptop. There is a graph that captures the caloric burn throughout a given day. So I can hold the mouse over the time I was doing yoga and see I burned about 3 calories a minute on average (which is cool, caloric burn not being my main motivator for yoga) and sometimes I hit 15 calories a minute on my runs.  Which is probably why yoga lasts an hour and a half and I can usually run 20 minutes before I need a walk break!

I know I need to focus on both sides of the equation - the calories in as well as the calories out. I also know the perfectionist in me gets caught up and bogged down in the details of calorie tracking. "If I don't know exactly how many ounces of turkey were in that sandwich I ordered, why bother tracking...?"  And once you skip tracking one meal, the whole day won't add up, will it?? One day last week, I just overestimated everything. That was a little depressing. I need to just do it and make peace with entries being a best estimate of what I consume on a given day. And stop overthinking it!

I'm also editing the layout here, since this will likely be a loooong journey (and I'm ok with that, really!  ok, mostly...) I weigh in every Tuesday and track it here and on my own spreadsheet and on my Bodybugg software. I've decided to track it here monthly. I think that will help me see the forest/big picture more than the smaller, weekly ups and downs. I need to get a better feel for the trend and this seems a good vehicle for that.