Week 1: Complete

So, technically my first full week came to a close yesterday but I didn't weigh until this morning.  Now, I weighed on a different scale this morning at work and it showed I gained a pound.  But I weighed at home this evening and I show about a two pound loss.  So I'm not sure which is correct. The one pound gain could be muscle.  Which I am completely ok with. My scale at home is not digital and I know the last time I lost weight I had to set it ahead five pounds to match the main scale I was using.  Needless to say (but I'm obviously going to anyway...silly phrase) I'm not sure what this week's results are.  It's a little frustrating but now that I saw what the digital scale said I have a little more accuracy.

Basically, I am buying a new scale this weekend.  The one I own was a cheapy I bought when I got married and is one of those old mechanical style ones.  I'm going to just spend the money on a decent digital.  That way I can really track progress.

Since my cheapy looks like two pounds lost I will enter that into the nifty little iPhone app I downloaded today.  I say iPhone but it's on the Android platform as well.  If you haven't already, you should download MyFitnessPal.  It's an easy way to keep a diary of the food you eat and the exercise you do.  It gives you a caloric intake goal based on your normal lifestyle and adjusts your daily goal based on the amount of physical activity you do.

For instance, my normal daily lifestyle is sedentary.  I work at a desk for 8+ hours a day.  I'm rarely on my feet and I'm not lifting anything heavy.  Based on this lifestyle alone the app told me my daily caloric intake should be about 1290 calories.  I freaked out at first thinking wait, wait, wait!  First off, what do I do about exercising?  I'm also a nursing mom and that burns like an extra 500 calories a day!  OMG I'm going to starve!  I can't do this!  After my minor freak out, I played around with the exercise entry and learned quickly the more exercise I do the more calories I get to eat.  Yey!  By the way, it's really hard to love food the way I do and want to lose weight.  I'm struggling with this part the most because not only do I love food, but I'm particularly in love with fried, greasy foods.  But today this app helped me be more conscious of what I put in my mouth and helped me make better choices.  The food diary part has over 1.1 million different entries with nutritional information to aid you in achieving your goal.  Another great plus?  You can add friends.  Yep.  It's also a social network.  The things you eat and do are logged on a timeline that looks similar to Twitter and people can comment.  So, if you want to be friends on MyFitnessPal, my username is stiprulz.  Look me up and we can help encourage one another.