I'm filled with self-congratulatory virtue this morning about my activity levels. I don't need to go to work today, and yet I was at the gym for personal training at 6 this morning (surprising cold this morning). I stayed after to run on their treadmill, and then took the dog for a long-ish walk (more than the minimum) right afterwards.
Perhaps all of this activity was at least partly sparked by my incredibly high reading on the scale this morning. I know I've been eating poorly, but didn't think it was that poorly. My food tracking sparked by the last post just a week ago only lasted a couple of days, so I don't have the data to analyze, but I have a distinct memory of a chocolate ice cream sandwich in there somewhere, not to mention the wonderful fajitas last night out with the family.
I've had the vague theory that all I needed to do was keep the activity up, mind most of my eating, and treats would be ok. Maybe they would if treats were small and occasional, but not big, constant, and more than once a day.
So I think I really really need to track. It's a pain, but it really makes a difference. It seems to do a couple of things for my motivation. Knowing I'm going to write it down causes me to change my behavior in advance. Having the proof in the data afterwards when I'm disappointed in the scale readings also is useful. It is really annoying, but I need to do it - if I care about my weight. And I do care about my weight. So tracking is an action I need to motivate. Yes, it's only a means to accomplish a different activity: eating better. But it seems to work, so motivating and rewarding tracking in and of itself - regardless of what I actually eat - is a meta-activity, or the high leverage point to accomplish what I really want: eating better and losing weight.
I sure wish there were even more seamless ways to track my eating. There is at least one app out there where you can take a photo of your food and it tries to estimate calories automatically. I don't know how well it works, but since I'm at least as focused on what I eat as how much, I don't think that would do it for me. I've found the single best food tracker to be My Fitness Pal. It has the normal annoying assumptions about what I'm supposed to eat which I reject. But it has the most comprehensive database of food, the ability to snap barcodes from the iphone, and versions for iphone, ipad and computer with all the data living in the cloud. It also talks to many other apps, so it exchanges activity data with my magic BMF activity tracker (raising its estimate of how many calories I can eat) and my scale, and the apps for those devices also pull in the food data. The one thing I don't like about the app (besides having to enter data at all which I can't find a way around) is the inability to export data for my own offline analysis. In fact, because MFP talks to my BMF activity tracker, I export summary food info from BMF instead. It's not very satisfactory, since it lacks a lot of detail but it's better than typing in data.
I've found one way to fuel my motivation for diet and exercise is to spend money. I make myself comply with something, and then if I do, I buy stuff. After running for three weeks, I bought three pieces of workout clothing. I was absurdly pleased last night to lay out my clothes for 5:30 this morning including my new bright blue miracle fabric workout tee, and even more pleased at the gym this morning to realize the shade exactly matches my blue-and-green running shoes. (I always say, attention to detail is the keynote to fashion success.) Now, I have to find stuff I really want for it to be motivating. Sometimes I shop first (online) and save my shopping cart for later. It also requires me to have discipline about not buying stuff just because I want it when I want it.
I have to do some work to find my quest object. I've also found that I need to not make the finish line too far away - a couple or three weeks. So we'll see how it goes.
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