Years ago, I decided that I needed to lose some weight, but for some reason it just wasn’t happening. We’ve all been there right? Well, I was having this conversation with my best friend, who decided (after I told her everything I was eating and drinking) that I could lose 15 pounds in record time if I followed her plan. Her plan was simple. Limit caloric intake, increase protein, track nutrients, exercise, and last but not least, no alcohol. Yikes. I was resistant at first, but decided I would do whatever she told me to do in order to achieve my goal weight by my deadline (I had a very important event that I wanted to look fabulous for).
She sent me her Food Log spreadsheet to track my food intake. This spreadsheet calculated the total amount of calories for each food item entered based on the amount of Fat, Protein, and Carbohydrates. Additional, for each day, it calculated what percentage of total calories eaten that day came from Fat, Protein, and Carbs. I also had a place to enter how much water I had drank that day, the type of exercise, and the number of calories burned. This is when I fell in love with my first favorite health tool, the heart rate monitor. I love how it tells me how much time I’ve spent in my “target zone” and how many calories I’ve burned in a particular workout. I need to see those tangible numbers so that I can compare workouts and see the progress I’m making. It motivates me to work harder when I look down and see that my heart rate isn’t quite as high as it has been in previous workouts. I also use it as a guide to know when to stop if I’m having a sluggish day. I say to myself, “just keep going until you’ve burned at least 300 calories and then you can stop.” I don’t know how people work out without one. But I digress (that’s for you John).
I followed the plan and sure enough, I looked better than ever for my event. Now, once again, I find myself in a similar position, needing to lose some weight. The only difference is that there is no special event or deadline. Just the need to fit into an entire closet full of clothes that are currently too small. This time, however, I decided I was going to try to use one of the many new mobile applications to track my food intake in order to make things easier on myself (I wouldn’t have to search for caloric information of foods online and then manually type them in, I could simply search large databases of foods). I got this idea as I saw my best friend (yes, the same best friend from before) type in her lunch into her nifty new iPhone app. I don’t own an iPhone, however, so I decided to do a little research into the Blackberry apps out there which claim to do the same thing. I downloaded several apps to my phone only to me extremely disappointed. Either they didn’t track protein (ahem…Mr. Armstrong), or they weren’t able to find simple foods in their database (in other words not making my life any easier), or they didn’t track exercise (I wanted it all in one application), or they were simply too complicated to use.
After several trials, I realized I would not be able to track my progress on my phone (at least not with all of the information that I wanted to track). I began to wonder if I was expecting too much from my mobile device! I even considered switching to an iPhone, but I just don’t think I could get past the service coverage issues and the onscreen keyboard. Plus, to be honest, I wasn’t certain (and still don’t really know) that the iPhone app would live up to my high expectations.
So, I dug up my trusty old spreadsheet and started tracking. That’s when I remembered my best friend mentioned an internet website that she had either used or was aware of that did a rather good job of tracking foods and exercise. Since I was already doing this on my computer anyway, I decided to go check it out. That’s when I fell in love with my new favorite health tool: www.sparkpeople.com. This application has it all. It is so easy to use and you can copy entries from one day to another. It has been able to find absolutely everything that I’ve thrown it’s way (including brown rice crackers and almond butter!), it tracks exercise and even automatically estimates calories burned based on exercise entered (or you can manually enter your own), and it has several different types of reports that you can see (which I absolutely love because I can see pie charts, tables, line graphs tracking my progress over time, and even net calories per day). I am absolutely addicted and I’ve already lost 6 pounds. I was so excited about my new discovery!
Then I saw that my husband was entering the meal we just ate into his new Android phone, and I began to ask questions about his app and watched him enter and search for foods. To my amazement, the app he was using was the one that I wanted to download to my BB originally but discovered it was not compatible with my BB. It seems to do most of what I want, but not quite everything. It is the closest thing out there, however, and if it were available on my phone I would definitely be using it (it is light years better than the other apps available for BB).
My only question now is…when will there be a mobile version of SparkPeople that I can use on my phone? Am I really expecting too much from my mobile phone?
