Count your blessings, and your calories!

One of the largest reasons for my success that I will preach about till I’m blue is the act of calorie tracking. It is necessary for most people who are looking to lose weight. I remember years ago when I was younger and my mom had me visiting a doctor at Sanford, they handed me this book that I was supposed to track everything in. Needless to say that book stayed empty, that was a lot of work that was just not fun in any way. However, in modern days this chore has become more of a hobby with phone apps and community driven databases of foods.

Since the crux of weight loss really comes down to eating less than you are burning, for most people that means they need some way to track how many calories they are taking in each day. Many people are able to do this quite naturally without paying much attention to it, but for those of us who find ourselves overweight or obese it’s a mechanism we just seem to lack the ability to lock down. Being able to see what you take in really opens your eyes to where some hidden calories might be coming from, or the effects of the small snacks you eat throughout the day as they compound on eachother.

At first it can seem tedious, but it quickly does become kind of fun. I’d recommend starting by downloading an app on your phone called MyFitnessPal. Using that and the website (myfitnesspal.com) you can search for pretty much every food under the sun. The nice part of modern tech is you can even use your phone to scan barcodes from within the app of food you are eating and it finds it automatically for you! It’s as simple as finding out how much of a food you ate, entering the name into a search bar, and hitting enter.

Question to answer down below: My challenge for you after reading this is to go to the website and/or download the app. Track your food that you ate through one day, did you see anything that surprised you?