Ambassador of Wellness : austin, diets

Custom Calories?

Eliz — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:18:00 GMT

Whether you use the Bodybugg Weight Managemtent System or fitday or the daily plate, or sparkpeople, to log your food, One of the complaints is that it takes a long time to find the food that you want to log. When I first started using fitday, I remember I typed in "milk" and got 350 items!

As with any new activity, it takes a while to get familiar with the new way of doing things; and that's uncomfortable. The key in being successful in the new behavior is getting through the discomfort. One thing that's a HUGE pain in the rear whenever you use a logging tool is not only finding the foods that you eat (and remembering how they're listed) but then entering the foods that aren't in the system that you consume.

Typically, we each eat about 100 foods over & over & over again. So, once you have those foods in the system, it's easy & that just takes time. If there's a specific brand or type of food that you eat that isn't in the system, I highly recommend that you create a custom food for it. In most systems, a user's custom foods are predominantly placed in the return items so that its easy to get to your custom foods.

Occasionally there will be a food that you won't want enter as a custom food; perhaps it's a energy bar or drink that you have no intention of eating again, or its a food item that you don't eat that often. In this case, I have a food-logging easability tip. (okay - I know that easability isn't a word, but it wasn't too long ago that sinage or gianormous weren't words either - and don't get me started on Rachel Ray's vocabulary!)

Create a custom food item titled "calorie". Then when you add your food that you know how many calories it is, but you don't want to add the custom food, just add your "calorie" food to your meal, and change the number of units to the number of calories in the food - 150, or whatever it might be. Easy!

You can get complicated with this tip or it can be easy. It's up to you. When I initially came up with this idea, I created a few foods titled "protein" "carbohydrate", "fat" and "fiber" and added each one as the nutrition label suggested. Each of the "protein" and "carbohydrate" items had 4 calories per gram, and the "fat" had 9 calories per gram. Fiber is non-digestible, so that calorie total was 0. The reason I did this was because I wanted to know how much protein, fat, and carbohydrates I was consuming. Most people don't care about that, so the "calorie" solution works just fine.

Happy Logging!

Copyright Elizabeth Sherman. Purchase a Bodybugg through Elizabeth Sherman.

I'll try not to let it go to my head

Eliz — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 16:21:00 GMT

I was interviewed by the local press last week about the Bodybugg. Jessica, my client did an excellent job in the interview & I think she even upstaged me a little bit. I'm excited about the buzz that it's causing. The news story was even picked up by not only the Texas Cable Network, but also three other markets: Austin, Las Vegas, and Topeka Kansas. How exciting!

Apex is thrilled with the exposure, as they should be. It's a really cool device & I'm confident that it will do well.

Lately, folks have been asking me if it will work for them. Yes, it will. However, I've been coming up with a list of criteria for those who it will work best with:

You're motivated enough to wear it all the time - If you only want to wear it part-time, then just go out & buy a heart rate monitor. It is meant to be worn most of your waking hours. Eventually, as you find that you're doing the same things over & over again, you can tell the application when you upload the data off the armband that you did the same activities as yesterday or the day before, but until you have that baseline set, you need to wear it daily.
You're willing to log your food - Just like logging your food without knowing how many calories you're burning is only half of the equation, so is wearing the bodybugg without logging your food. And let me add here that not only are you willing to log your food, but you're willing to be honest with yourself about what you're eating. Be aware that even the most diligent person will underestimate their calorie intake by 15 - 20%, but when you're doing fuzzy estimations, "I had 2 glasses of wine," and those two glasses of wine were served in over-sized wine glasses that could hold half the bottle, you're not being honest, and therefore dis-serving yourself.
You don't get flustered by technology - This is a tool that heavily relies on a web application to make it useful. If you're a techno-phobe, this may not be the tool for you.

Between the armband and the web application, anyone can accomplish their goals. The question about will it work for you depends on whether you'll leverage those tools to be successful.

The application has some great reports that you can use to help in your success too. For instance: if you log a calorie deficit of 500 Calories a day, you should lose 1 lb per week. If after 1 week you only lose 1/2 lb, the application will tell you that you were underestimating your calories by 250. Now instead of getting mad at the application, you can look at that data & think, "Okay, so I'm clearly missing something. It looks like I need to cut back my calories a bit more to be on goal, so instead of creating a calorie deficit of 500, I'll lower my intake an additional 250 (the amount that I'm off) to create a 750 Calorie deficit.

And for anyone who says that $250 is a lot of money for the Bodybugg; yes, it is a lot of money, however in 2006 alone, people spent $35 billion dollars on books, supplements, gadgets, creams & services. This one works. It's not a magic bullet that you can sit back & it will do the work, however if used correctly, it can facilitate a lifestyle change - and that means that it could be the last $250 you contribute to the multi-billion dollar diet industry.

Copyright Elizabeth Sherman. Purchase a Bodybugg through Elizabeth Sherman.

It's Very Freeing

Eliz — Wed, 28 May 2008 17:37:00 GMT

I really love my bodybugg! I love it because I am so close to achieving my goal. And that's exciting. It's exciting to know that as a personal trainer and nutritionist, I'm not a failure at losing weight -- I just didn't have the proper tools before. And it's amazing to me how easy it is.

As I've said before, I've always had a rather clean diet, and I've journaled my food for years -- nothing new there. I don't think I'm exercising more either. I haven't given up carbohydrates, and I still pretty much eat chocolate every day. I have become more aware of my hunger, and I try to eat to that, however whenever I had tried to eat according to my hunger cues in the past, it had led to eventual overeating. I think there were days that I certainly didn't eat enough for my activity level, and then the following day I would be ravenous, practically eating the drywall off the walls.

Since I've started using the bodybugg, I really haven't had any major swings in appetite. I'm rarely hungry because I'm eating an appropriate amount of food to fuel my activity; and I feel more energetic too!

So, the bodybugg tracks how many calories I burn in a day. By keeping my calorie intake just below my calorie burn, not only am I rarely hungry, but when I am, it is so slight that I am able to control the urge. By knowing how many calories my body needs, and controlling that threshold of the calorie deficit, I'm able to break free of the cycle of under-eating, over-eating, guilt, even more under-eating, and so on...

I am now finally in control of what I eat instead of my diet controlling me!

Copyright Elizabeth Sherman. Purchase a Bodybugg through Elizabeth Sherman.

The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.

Eliz — Sat, 10 May 2008 21:06:00 GMT

It's not that people lie on purpose; when it comes to weight loss, the most recent statistics show overweight people underreporting daily food intake by 30-40% while normal weight individuals underreport by 16%. Virtually no one over-reports their food intake. Additionally, they'll overestimate how much they move. The combination of those two little white lies that folks tell themselves is partially to blame the expanding waistline of the American public.

I'm not immune to these lies. I feel like I've struggled with my weight for years. Well, wait... let me back up there. For most of my life I ate whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. It wasn't until I was in my first marriage that I used food to emotionally cope with my problems. Although I wasn't fit when I got married, I was thin, and when I got divorced,I was definitely fat. Here's my transformation in case you've missed it.

Since I've taken the bulk of the weight off, I've still struggled; my weight has fluctuated no more than 20 lbs for the past few years. Still, I'd like it to be more stable. Recent attempts to lower my weight on my own have been half successful. Now I admittedly have very little weight to lose; I just want my clothes to fit better - a little roomier.

One of my problems has always been that I scoffed at the calorie estimators that said that I probably needed about 2000 calories in order to maintain my weight. I swore that 2000 calories was waayy too many calories; I'd balloon back up to 175 lbs if I ate that much. I have a slower metabolism than the calculators are estimating.

Another one of my problems is that I gave myself an entire cheat day on Saturdays. Anything I wanted, I ate. And let me tell you that I can eat a lot! The concept of a cheat day is that one day of overeating is good for a person who is restricting their calorie intake as it gives the body and brain a break. Too low of a caloric intake for too long could cause the body to stop shedding fat, and rather try to preserve it in order to stay alive. Although I have kept an electronic journal of my food consumption for years, I never tracked my food for those "cheat" days because 1) it was too difficult to estimate, and 2) it would have been too difficult to admit to how many (empty & junk food) calories I was really eating. Ignorance is bliss, you know.

So the tool that I am now using to manage my weight is called the bodybugg. I've been using the bodybugg since March 19th (just over 7 weeks). Within that time, I've lost 6 lbs!

I would love to tell you that the bodybugg has made me lose the weight, but the truth is that it's just a tool. One thing that I really like about it is that it cuts through the bull crap that a dieter can dish out: "I have a slow metabolism!" Because the bodybugg knows how many calories you're burning, the only real variable is the food that you're journaling. So, as you progress towards your goal, when you weigh yourself weekly, the application will give you feedback as to how accurately you're tracking your calories.

Here's a screen shot of one of the reports that is useful to see how realistic you are being with the foods that you consume.

So in this graphic, the light green bars represent the number of calories I logged each day. The dark green line is the number of calories that the application estimates that I ate based on my weekly weigh-ins. Overall, I"m not doing too badly. I'm underestimating my calories by 111 per day, or 16% - just under the average.

"What have you been doing that's different?" That's a question that I've been getting recently as people are noticing the decrease in my size. Well a couple of things:

Although I allow myself to eat anything I want, I have gotten a little more precise about measuring & weighing my food portions. And, thanks to the bodybugg, I'm journaling my food again - which, by the way the application makes it very easy to do. It's a really nice interface.
I've been pretty strict about asking myself "Am I hungry?" when I'm eating; AND stopping eating when I'm no longer hungry. Which is different than stopping when I'm full.
I don't save my cheats for one day a week anymore. As you can see from the graphic above, I have a higher calorie day on Saturdays, but I eat chocolate pretty much every day. I just don't have a whole bar; I leave it to about 100 calories. I sprinkle treats in throughout the week, and I make them work with my calorie budget for the day.
I've been moving more. When you upload the data from the armband to the bodybugg application, it charts your movement across 24 hours of the day. When I'm sitting, I only burn about 1 calorie per minute. When I run, I burn about 11 c/m. When I'm just moving around the house cleaning up or doing basic chores, I burn about 3 c/m. I HATE seeing those 1 calorie per minute lines. So, instead of just sitting on the couch, I'm up & doing more. It's extremely motivating!

I used to be one of those people who thought that they had a slow metabolism. I really thought that I had to starve myself in order to lose weight. Its just not true; and the bodybugg is proof of it. The truth is that the calorie estimators were wrong. I don't burn an average of 2000 calories per day. I burn about 2200!

"People say they love truth, but in reality they want to believe that which they love is true."

- Robert J. Ringer

Copyright Elizabeth Sherman. Purchase a Bodybugg through Elizabeth Sherman.

But ... how do you know? Part 2

Eliz — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:30:00 GMT

The art of weight loss isn't rocket science, however given the fact that weight loss is a multi-billion dollar industry, we can see that it eludes quite a number of folks. Weight maintenance/loss/gain is simply a matter of "calories in" versus "calories out". On the nutrition side, if you eat more calories than your body needs, you'll gain weight; if you eat the same number of calories that your body needs, then you will maintain your weight; and if you consume fewer calories than your body needs to maintain it's weight, you will lose weight. But, how do you know how many calories your body needs to maintain it's weight?

In But ... how do you know? Part 1, I explained that our metabolism (BMR),depending on how active a person is, can make up for approximately 75% or less of our calories burned. I also explained how we can estimate our BMR. So, that gives us a starting point.

The thing is, the body is a very complex sophisticated organism. In order to lose weight, you want to take in fewer calories than your body needs. But, take in too few & the body thinks that it is going to starve, so it starts doing 2 things: 1) slowing the metabolism so that it's able to work on fewer calories, and 2) starts burning off muscle which is more expensive for the body to maintain than fat (since muscle consumes more calories than fat, it makes sense for the body to get rid of those things that are going to allow it to stay around the longest). So there's a very fine line between maximizing your weight loss, and stunting it.

The calories that create that buffer between healthy weight loss & danger are created by Thermic Effect of Food(TEF) & Thermic Effect of Activity (TEA). They are the calories that our bodies burn by eating & digesting food, and movement.

So, how do you know what your burn? Up until recently, there have only been estimations available - based on your daily activity/job (office worker versus waitress). Heart Rate Monitors do a pretty good job estimating calories burned during exercise, however it's estimate is only based on heart rate, which isn't always accurate; for example, it doesn't take into account body fat percentage.

I was thrilled when I found out about the bodybugg by Apex Fitness (which is a division of 24 Hour Fitness). The bodybugg is a device that you wear on your arm (similar to an iPod) that records your movement. It completely takes the guess work out of the "calories in" versus "calories out" equation.

This is what I see when I login to the web application that goes along with the bodybugg device. It's got a great interface - it's really easy to use. You can upload your activity from the device multiple times a day or save it up for several days. Then, you log your food for each meal & see how it relates to your calorie needs for the day.

Now, I've logged my food on & off for years. At the beginning, I was very diligent about measuring & weighing my foods prior to eating them, but then I thought that I had a good handle on what a Tablespoon of dressing/peanut butter looked like, so I stopped. Gradually, those two Tablespoons of peanut butter grew to be a 1/4 cup! I thought I was eating two tablespoons, but I was eating twice that much!

What's cool about the bodybugg application, is that because we underestimate how much food we eat by at least 20%, when we weigh in, it compares how much we said that we ate to and estimate of how much we ate based on the weight.

In this article, I've been focused on weight loss, but there are lots of programs for folks who want to improve sports performance, or maintain their weight, and even for those who we are jealous of because they're trying to gain weight.

This is a tool that I am really impressed by. I think it can really help those folks who are ready to make a serious change. In fact, I've decided to add the bodybugg to my business, and start distributing it to help my clients.

Copyright Elizabeth Sherman. Purchase a Bodybugg through Elizabeth Sherman.