Since my last post, I’ve been getting a lot of friend requests for, and questions in email about, the LoseIt app. Rather than reply one off, I wanted to do a brief post for the 4 of you that read this Tumblr page (hi mom!) and those who are asking me for tips on how to get up and running on LoseIt.
Despite being a very vocal fan of the app I don’t believe its a silver bullet nor do I think calorie tracking/restricting is the only think you need to do to reach your weight or fitness goal. The biggest thing LoseIt did for me was give me a structured way to build good habits.
What kind of good habits? It forced me to start looking at labels and really understanding what I was putting in my mouth. It helped me to understand what a real “serving” looked like. It taught me that there are trade offs to be made that can be equally satisfying, i.e., more working out = more calories I get to have that day. It taught me that there are “right” kinds of calories to base your day around and “wrong” kinds of calories that can be reserved for infrequent indulgences without going off the rails. More than anything, it helped me a lay a foundation that I can base all my food and fitness related decisions around as opposed to some bursty/unsustainable diet scheme. Note: I hit my weight target back in June and have stayed at roughly the same weight since (some would say I need to put some weight back on…).
So, here are a few tips for getting up and running with LoseIt:
- Be Honest: no one wins trying to cheat at overestimating how much you’re working out, or how little you’re eating. The app makes it super easy to get rough estimates for calories burned working out or calories from foods in their database. As with all things health related these are not hard and fast, but rough estimates. Unless you want to be weighing all of your food and wearing heart rate monitors all day, their defaults will get you in the right range. My rule on exercise: when in doubt, round down the intensity and amount of time you spent working out and, with food, round up.
- Be diligent: Look, we all futz with our phones all day- checking email, updating twitter, texting, the beauty of the app is its right there next to all of those on your phone. I put it right on my home screen. Every time I finished a meal or ate something, I’d plug it in. Even if I went buck wild and ate something I shouldn’t, it went in. See the first bullet. I found myself getting hooked on managing that little green bar. Every day we went to battle. Some days it won, some days I would never even see it because I would push crazy hard on a workout in the morning which gave me a big enough reserve that I never dipped into my daily allotment. Let the green bar be your friend and nemesis all in one. Its much more fun that way.
- Be smart: There are lots of great trade offs you can make to shave calories throughout the day. Go with egg whites instead of full eggs, wheat tortillas over flour, lean proteins (chicken or fish) instead of red meat, water or diet coke instead of the full octane stuff, removing the top slice of bread on a sandwich, and on. This could be a whole separate post, but needless to say, there are loads of ways to eat well and still stay within your caloric budget.
- Be detailed: fortunately the app has a ton of foods and exercises in their native database to cover a lot of foods you eat everyday. Though the course of last year, I was on the road for a couple days nearly every week which meant lots of eating out and packaged food on the run. The nice thing about the apps is that if a food isn’t in the database, once you’ve input it one time, its yours forever and you only need to focus on one thing on the package- calories per serving (the app let’s you add more detail, but that’s all I ever added). As for restaurants, most dast food places will have a calorie count posted (if they don’t post it, you can ask and most will have it). Fine dining can be a bit trickier, but most of the base foods are in the database so just go with the assumption that they’re covered in butter and oils and round up. There is a limit to how much detail you can gather, but I found that the more I invested in getting the detail, the more valuable the app became to me.
- Be Active: Seriously. Once I started seeing the world as calories in vs. calories burned a fire was lit. Creating calories for myself everyday became great motivation for getting active and working out. Most days, I would burn between 500 and 1,000 calories at the gym, running or on the bike. The first thing I would do after every workout was plug it into the app so I could see how many calories I bought myself.
I could go on and on, so I’ll stop. It sounds over the top, but the LoseIt app and the discipline and visibility it gave me have been life changing on a bunch of levels. But, I may be an edge case. I’ve turned a bunch of friends onto it for whom it hasn’t stuck, but for those it has, they’ve seen similar results and macro changes in their lives beyond the reading on their scale. So to you friends who are giving it a shot as part of this new year, good luck! And, hit me up if you have questions or just need a little push…
