Reaching Goals

I am so excited! Last month I decided that I was going to try to exercise regularly and see if I could lose some weight. I’d never really attempted to lose weight before – I enjoy sports and being active outdoors, but I’m not an athlete or anything, and I’m definitely less active in the winter time here. And I’d never been very aware of how healthy my food was – I mean, we try to choose 100% whole wheat bread and pasta, eat brown rice instead of white, I’ve always chosen skim milk, and our family loves lots of different kinds of roasted vegetables with dinner – but if someone asked me how many calories were in any given food (or even how many calories a person is supposed to eat per day) I wouldn’t have a clue. So, deciding to get healthy has been a big deal for me.

For my birthday a year ago Michael got me the Wii Fit Plus, which is a series of games that involve balance and/or physical activity. We’ve enjoyed the Wii Fit as a fun thing to do with the family, but hadn’t tried to use it for any serious exercise before.

So, on December 12th I committed to do some kind of exercise on the Wii for at least 30 minutes a day, 6 days a week (not on Sundays). I knew this wasn’t going to be a huge amount of exercise, but it was more than I was doing before. I would try to do some of the games on the Wii Fit that seemed more active, or I’d play tennis on Wii Sports, which I love (and the tennis is a pretty decent work out for me, since I really swing my arms pretty hard and get into it). So I did that for a week or so, and I was feeling pretty proud of myself for sticking with it and not missing any days. One night I mentioned that I hadn’t really seen much change in my weight (even though I knew it’d only been about a week and I couldn’t expect things to change overnight), but Michael commented that you won’t really lose weight with the kinds of things I was doing on the Wii – that it needed to be aerobic or weight lifting or something that would increase the heart rate and keep it up for a length of time. At first I was a little discouraged by that comment, but then I just decided to take the advice for what it was worth, and change my exercise goals a bit (and prove Michael wrong that I really could lose weight using the Wii to exercise). :)

So on December 21st I decided to switch from exercising 30 minutes 6 days a week to exercising for 1 hour 6 days a week. And the following day I got a couple of 5 lb weights and decided to use the “free step” feature on the Wii Fit Plus. So you just step up and down off the Wii balance board over and over, and I held the weights while swinging my arms as I did this. The longest setting for the free step is 30 minutes, so I do that twice in a row. It allows you to change the channel on the tv while you are stepping, so you can watch tv or a movie while exercising. I decided this was the best way for me to go, since I thought I might get bored after a while with the Wii games, and I like watching movies. I’ve started checking out a handful of movies from the library each week to watch, so there’s always something new. And it’s been working really well. For a few days my left wrist started to hurt pretty badly from holding the weight, but it stopped after a few more days. So, most days I do 1 hour of the stepping with the weights. And once in a while I throw in a little extra, doing the jogging in place on the Wii fit that also allows you to watch a movie while keeping track of your time, steps, etc. I know that I could probably be getting a heavier work out at a gym or something, but this is something that I know I can keep up – it’s at home, so I can do it any time of day or night, and unlike the gym I can do it at home when the kids are asleep, even if Michael happens to be late at work one night or something.

Then, on December 28th, I made the biggest change: I started keeping track of the calories in the foods I eat. I’d never done this before, and it was a big change. I’ve changed my diet a lot to include healthier foods, and foods that will keep me full longer. (Some of this has been changing the foods I eat, but a lot of it has been eating smaller portion sizes).

My friends recommended a free website called myfitnesspal.com, which I love. First it asks for your info – age, height, weight – then it asks what kind of lifestyle you have – sedentary, somewhat active, very active (I chose sedentary, even though some days I am more active than that, I figured it’d be better to say I’m less active than I am, rather than more active). It asks what your goals are for how much exercise you plan to do per week. Then it asks what your weight goal is – to lose 2 lbs a week, 1 lb a week, maintain your current weight, gain weight, etc. And it takes all that info and calculates how many calories you should consume from food per day. The idea is that you can eat a certain number of calories per day, and if you do exercise and say you burn 300 calories, you can add that to the number of calories you can eat per day. So, when I started out doing this it said I could eat 1430 calories per day, plus how ever much I burned from exercise. I did that for a few days before changing my numbers a bit to more accurately reflect how many calories I was burning from exercise, so my goal is to eat 1200 calories per day, plus how ever much I burn exercising. I’ve stuck with that goal since January 1st, and it’s really seemed to work well. (The one thing I’m not totally sure about is how many calories I’m burning from my hour of stepping each day – just because the Wii Fit calculates how many calories you burn, but it’s just calculating the calories burned from the stepping, and not taking into account that I’m holding the weights while I step, which I assume is burning more calories, but I’m just entering the number that the Wii Fit says for calories burned, so that may not be totally accurate, but oh well.)

It was exciting, because around January 7th, a few days before my 30th birthday, according to the Wii Fit I had lost enough weight so that I was no longer technically “overweight.” I still have a little while to go before I hit my goal, but it was nice to see that.

In my attempt at eating healthy and being very good at keeping track of calories, I was spending a lot of time using measuring cups and spoons to measure out each serving of everything I ate. And Michael has been so supportive, and very patient with me when I do things like delay dinner because I was busy calculating how many calories are in a recipe. A few days ago I used some birthday money from my grandma to get a digital kitchen scale, which has helped a lot to speed up the process of calculating the calories in the food (and I’m sure it’s more accurate than using measuring cups). It’s also been nice, because you can measure each of the ingredients in a recipe, then take the total measurement and enter that info into the “recipe” part of the website. Then, when you’re ready to eat, you can just weigh the amount that you eat, and it will tell exactly how many calories (and other nutritional information) that you consumed. So when I did my big once a month cooking day this week, I made sure to measure everything and enter it into the site, and now whenever we pull one of the meals out of the freezer to eat, all I have to do is weigh my portion and I’m all set. Anyway, the scale has been nice (I think I’m going to pack it and take it with me when we go out of town in a couple weeks). That’s my one concern right now – keeping this up when we go out of town. I want to keep motivated, so I’m going to try my best to continue eating healthy and exercising even when we’re not at home.

Today I also got a new “toy” to go along with all this: I used some of my birthday money from Michael’s parents to get a cool watch that not only tells time, but it also tracks your heart rate, your steps, and a few other things, including your calories burned during exercise. I haven’t even had a chance to open it up and try it out yet, but I’m excited to see if it works well, because if it does, then I can measure how many calories are burned if I do a different kind of exercise than my standard. This will be especially helpful when we go to San Diego and we have the opportunity to be outdoors and do lots of different kinds of exercise, and I’ll be able to get some kind of accurate idea of how many calories are burned if the kids and I decide to go on a walk or something.

So here’s the coolest thing so far: as of today I have lost 10 pounds from when I first started doing any exercising/eating healthy. I’m way exciting that this is all actually working well! Now if I can just keep it up, it’ll all be worth it.