Your Body Is Like a Bank (for Calories)
June 21st, 2014The body is in many ways similar to a bank when it comes to calories. When you eat something, your body extracts the calories from food much like making a cash deposit in your bank. You will either burn them off doing physical activities or store them in the form of fat. Calories never “disappear” on their own without being used in some way.
You need to be mindful of your caloric intake. Just like many banks have apps where you can see your debits and credits, there are apps that can track your calories. I recommend the myfitnesspal.com app. It is available for many different smart phones and tablets. When you set up the app, it calculates your estimated calorie needs. Then comes the fun part. You enter each food into the app as you are eating them. The myfitnesspal app has a huge selection of food and you can even choose the items by brand name. For example, I ate a Chobani Fat Free Greek Yogurt with Blueberries this morning, and the app posted the exact calories (130) into my food diary and subtracted them from my daily calories. This eliminates the extra step of reading the nutrition labels each time you eat something. As you check the app throughout the day, you can see how many calories you have left in the day before you “accumulate debt” and start storing extra calories. The goal is to end up with “0” or if you have a weight loss goal “negative” for the day. I have been using this app and I find it extremely helpful to find out lower calorie alternatives to the food I’m eating. For example, if you wanted to splurge and eat a full size bag of m&m’s, you would first realize it is a lot of calories, but myfitnesspal will also show you foods that are similar and you can pick a lower calorie alternative. For example, a snack size bag of m&m’s would be half the calories. This allows you to learn new healthier options so that in the future you can make wiser food choices.
Another aspect of this app that helpful is the ability to add in exercise. It give a rough estimate of how many calories you burned. For example, if you ran on the treadmill, you can enter the time and the distance and it will take those calories burned and add to your daily allotment of calories. You learn pretty quickly that its difficult to burn off calories even though you’ve been huffing and puffing for half an hour on the treadmill! Was that slice of chocolate cake last night worth it? These are realizations that come about with tracking your calories. Try the app for at least two weeks and you will learn more about what you are eating and get motivated to exercise. If you are looking to lose weight, this is one effective way to get started.
