Wednesday, January 6, 2010

This will keep you honest...





I have days that I just can't stop eating. I try to only keep healthy things in our house for such days. I realize that a lot of this hormonally related, but I also find that if I start the day eating unhealthy foods, I'll just keep on eating them (know what I mean?). Now, if I exercise and start my day with a healthy breakfast, I can usually continue the trend.

I enjoy running, but not so much in the frigid weather. Rob has actually been running very consistently, in the snow, in the wind, in the rain, and in the very cold mornings we've been having the past few weeks. I try to use my exercise tv on our comcast box or on my laptop, and I enjoy that almost as much as running outside.

My sister-in-law took a nutrition class for her master's equivalency a number of years ago. She utilized an online tool that calculates your calories and evaluates the foods you've eaten and gives a breakdown of the vitamins and minerals. She called to get a list of everything Josh had eaten the day before. The result was actually quite pleasing and I was interested in the website so I could gauge my own diet.

The actual tool is a program of the University of Illinois and a bit labor-intensive, but I do it every so often to keep myself in check. Basically you enter all of the foods you ingest during the day. It seems that they have many "brand-name" pre-packaged foods, and since we rarely eat things like that, I needed to improvise. What I do is to input all of the ingredients used to make the foods I eat. For example, if I make tomato bisque for my lunch, I simply enter: 1 fresh tomato, 1 T butter, 1 small onion, etc.

If you're interested, here is the link: http://nat.illinois.edu/mainnat.html

By the way, I have not figured out how to link a website without just listing the whole address. I love how other bloggers say, "here"...anyone know how to do that? I'm sure it's probably pretty simple, but I haven't figured it out yet!

My results usually go something like this: calories are higher than recommended, vitamin c is higher than recommended, vitamin d is lower, and the rest are just about normal. The results are posted in a percentage. For example, my calories are usually posted as 113% of the recommended daily calories.

Let me know what you think! Tell me if you decide to try it and if you find it helpful.

1 comment:

  1. hey! lance armstrong has a great calorie counter http://www.livestrong.com and it's super easy. i just checked it out a few times but i don't care that much about calories! :)
    and how to do "here"
    go to a new post... type in here, highlight it with your mouse, then up in the tool bar section next to the "colors" you will see a little link deal click that on and put in your web address you are wanting to go "here". click ok and you are good to go! make sense?

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