I’ve been on a bit of a healthkick lately. And by lately, I’m referring to a determined effort I kicked off about two weeks ago, rather than the ‘live well’ mantra I’ve been trying to maintain for the last, well, longer bit.
The problem is, I like junk food. I mean, it tastes of awesome. But there’s been a few things I’ve discovered lately that have helped me exercise the ol’ willpower a little better. All three come via the awesome Lifehacker (two from this post), the authors of which have been helping me streamline my digital existence for a while.
The first is Gyminee, a social network for people being healthy, which tracks your diet and exercise, gives you a scorecard and loads of handy graphs demonstrating your progress. Call me a sucker, but I’ve upgraded to the PRO version and am being diligent about it. You can’t really lie to the system and it has a lot of commonly consumed foods in its database. If it doesn’t – you can add foods manually, as I did for the Eat Italian Ragu soup I had last week (healthalicious). Specifically – it lets you enter a weight loss target, estimates your base metabolic rate based on a number of pieces of information you feed it, and gives you a calorie target to achieve to result in aforementioned weight loss. V. useful, and good motivation.
Next up, given my penchant for eating the unhealthiness that is modern junk food, Dr Gourmet’s guide to eating healthily at fast-food outlets. The guide (available as PDF) weighs heavily toward the American menus, but gives a good general sense of the calorie and fat contents of the healthier options at McDs, etc. Not that you’d need more than common sense to avoid foods like this. Probably also worth pointing out that I had the fear of Subway put in me by Channel 4’s Dispatches a few months back.
The final piece just helps acts as a bit of a deterrent against the junk food indulgence. Again US focussed, this Ads vs Reality piece is pretty offputting. And whilst I don’t know what Arbees is, I definitely don’t want to go there.
I’ve got a lot of kilos to lose before the wedding. Wish me luck!
This may get cross posted to Division6 when I get round to it…
Chivalry House 