Calorie Tracking: Day 8

For the last 8 days, I have been tracking my calorie intake. I have been using the app, My Fitness Pal.

Apparently it is one of the 'rich habits' encouraged by Thomas Corley in his book. Tracking down your calorie intake allows any one person to better understand their food habits, which I have found to be true.

Corley recommends doing this for over a period of 60 days as a start.

The app itself is quite well developed and seems to have worked for many people in their goal to manage what they eat and for calorie tracking. What makes it even easier to use is that it has a bar code scanner that can scan every food item that has a bar code.

Of course, one also can't rely on just that. Just remember that in general, every 1 gram of protein, and carbohydrate has a value of 4 calories. Every 1 gram of fat has a value of 9 calories.

Granted it wasn't easy, but it took a while to get used to. After the first few days, I started to notice better my food habits and patterns.

I realised that on the days I do not take breakfast, I tend to binge and snack more during lunch time. As a result, I started to try to have more than just a glass of milk at breakfast, and also take a fruit like bananas for breakfast.

Also during the times when I was really stressed trying to manage the children at work, I had a tendency to snack a little more and get hungry faster and want a more sugary snack. Of course, this doesn't work out any healthier for my mood and I would regret having so much sugar during those times.

I also realised that people around me thought that I may be going through some 'food fad', telling that Christmas is once a year and I shouldn't worry about eating too much.

It is probably not the best time of the year to be on calorie restriction, but this bulging muffin top, and a sore back is driving me to my wits end.

However, if one has a goal and wants to lose weight, one must be diligent and practise discipline to manage their weight and spend some time on some sort of outdoor movement, and fitness in order to pursue it.

Spending time maintaining the garden is part of my outdoor activity, as someone has to do it anyways!

Having my Garmin Vivofit3 tracker watch was a godsend. I realised the more I walked and exercised, the more 'bonus' calories I could earn as an incentive if I wanted to indulge a little more in snacks  if I wanted to. (I will write more about my Garmin tracker on another day).

The data from the steps that I took would be pulled into the My Fitness Pal app to calculate a more accurate number of calories I could have in one day.

So far in average, I had less than 1400 calories in a day. I had to pause and think about each item I wanted to mindlessly nibble on. However when I considered I needed to itemise them into the calorie diary, I decided not to.

I will have to wait till I head to the gym later this week in order to weigh myself on the scales.