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Create a New Family Tradition This Year

by Max Shireman on November 2, 2009 · Comments

Family ReunionAs Summer ends and we head into the Fall holiday season I wanted to share an idea with you that hopefully will put a smile on your face.  What I suggest is that you create a new tradition with your friends or family.  Take some aspect of one of the upcoming holidays and make it your own special tradition.

 Two years ago my wife came up with the idea of having a pumpkin carving contest for our friends and family.  We get together about a week before Halloween and everyone brings there own pumpkin.  We make a pot of chili for our guest and then converge on my garage and begin carving up our pumpkins.  We have a prize for the best creation and a prize for the most “aesthetically” challenged jack lantern.   It’s always fun and we already have people asking about this year’s carving. 

Creating traditions helps provide a solid foundation for family and friends.  It brings people together, provides a chance for everyone to catch up and helps remind everyone what’s important in life…  family and friends.  Good luck and I hope to hear about some cool outings.

photo by: deansouglass

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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.

A Bugg’s Life (Volume 3)

by Laura Tabler on May 7, 2009 · Comments

How difficult is it to burn 3,000 calories a day?

Thankfully, it’s probably much easier than you think.
 
When I joined the bodybugg program about 3 months ago, I learned that to reach my weight loss goals, I needed to burn about 2,500 calories each and every day. 
 
Let’s just say I felt defeated from the get-go. I have a treadmill at home, and it shows distance traveled, heart rate, and calories burned. I recalled burning about 500 calories after an hour of walking or 30 minutes of jogging (neither of which I did very often). I thought to myself, “How in the world will I be able to burn 2,500 calories in a day and work a full time job?”
 
After wearing the bodybugg for about a week, I realized that burning 2,500 calories in a day is a very attainable goal when you add up all of the little (and seemingly insignificant) activities that most people do every day. For those of you who are not familiar with the bodybugg, it is a device that you wear on your arm and tracks your calories burned using sensor technology
 
It also helps that the bodybugg also calculates calories burned even when you are not exercising. Who knew that people burn a little more than 1 calorie per minute when they are sedentary or even asleep? 
 
Here was a typical weekday’s worth of activity for me when I first began the bodybugg program:
o        Walk from my parking garage to the office (and vice versa – probably about 7 minutes each way)
o        Take about a 25 minute walk outside at lunch time (weather permitting)
o        Walk my dogs around the neighborhood twice (probably about 20 – 25 minutes)
 
Believe it or not, I usually hit my goal just doing these regular, daily activities!
 
After the encouragement of routinely reaching my daily goal for caloric burn, I decided to test myself – could I reach 3,000 calories burned in a day? In addition to the fact that I am very competitive (even against myself in this case), I found a huge motivator for burning the extra calories was the fact that I would be able to eat more calories in a day if I burned 3,000 calories that same day. Let’s be serious here – the ability to eat more than the 2,000 calories a day that was originally allotted to me by the bodybugg program was way more motivating than any competition I might have with or against myself.
 
So…I decided to make my reality tv habit more constructive by recalling an old mantra spoken to me by many a teacher (and my mother – also a teacher by the way) when I was in grade school – “use your time wisely”.  I started walking on the treadmill about an hour a day while I got my latest reality tv fix. This has been the greatest change I have made for myself – and my health – in a long time. I am making real progress in my weight loss, and I am not taking any extra time out of my normal day to work out. I would have been in front of the tv anyway – only I would have been laid up on the couch rather than walking on the treadmill. 
 
I have been amazed at the results of this change. As of now, I burn an average of 3,500 calories per day – and thus I have been able to lose weight at about twice the rate that I had originally planned. I am happy to report that when I got on the scale this morning, I was 23.5 pounds lighter than I was before I began the bodybugg program. Only a pound and a half to go until I hit my goal weight (which I must admit was seemingly unattainable to me before I started the program).
 
Those of you who read my first post know that I first learned about the bodybugg while watching an episode of The Biggest Loser.  Now, as I walk on the treadmill while taking in my favorite shows, I feel like I’m working out right alongside the contestants.
 
Who knew reality tv could be so good for you? :)

photo by: Jos Dielis

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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.

11 iPhone Apps to Track Calories Burned

by Chris Hall on April 10, 2009 · Comments

Some people eat for the experience, others eat to survive… If you’re on either side of that spectrum or somewhere in the middle, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to easily track your calories consumed and burned so that you can start to manage your diet? Research has shown that people who record the food they consume lose twice as much weight as those who don’t…

While you’re chewing on that, ask yourself: What if I had my own personal nutritionist in the palm of my hand every time I put food into my mouth?

These eleven iPhone apps will put that dietician in your pocket, helping you take the guess work out of eating.  Here is the breakdown:

Lose It!
Free
If you’re just getting into calorie tracking and you want to try before you buy then this app is for you.  Lose It! allows you set daily calorie budgets and track your progress against them via a searchable database of food and exercises. Get into calorie management for free with this iPhone application, and see how it works for you.

Sensei for Weight Loss
Free to Current Online Members
Sensei is a holistic approach to healthier eating developed by doctors, dieticians, and psycologists. The system helps you develop personalized meal plans, receipes, and shopping lists based on what and where you like to eat, helping you develop the perfect plan around you.

CalorieCheck
$.99
CalorieCheck provides detailed nutritional information from the United States Department of Agriculture for over seven thousand different foods. This app doesn’t manage your caloric intake, but it gives you insight into the nutritional information around some of your favorite foods, empowering you to make better decisions.

Calorie Pad
$1.99
Calorie Pad allows you to track your caloric intake from over six thousand products and menu items from major restaurants. Some other features include: the ability to mark favorite foods for quick repeat entry and the ability to add partial and multiple amounts of foods giving you a customizable data entry tool to track your daily intake.

Calorie Abacus
$1.99
This app takes a different approach to tracking caloric intake and is designed around the question: "If I am allowed to eat 1,000 calories, what are my options?" Calorie Abacus allows for meal creation flexibility that lets you easily find food substitutes to meet your daily nutritional goals.

LIVESTRONG Calorie Tracker
$2.99
The most popular iPhone calorie tracking app is a mobile companion tool for Daily Plate users at LIVESTRONG.COM. This tool allows you to track your daily caloric, fat, carbohydrate and protein intake, while giving you access to more than 525,000 food and restaurant items. You can also track the calories that you burned with a bunch of preloaded fitness activities to choose from.

Nutrition Menue – Calorie Counter
$2.99
Provides nutritional information for over 79,000 food and restaurant items and includes a calculator to help you identify your Food Score so that you can rest assured that your next meal fits within your dietary requirements.  There is no monthly subscription fee associated with this app, so $2.99 is all you have to pay for mobile nutrition zen.

Fast Food Calorie Counter
$2.99
Fast food and nutrition sound like they don’t go together, but the people at Concrete Software have created a calorie tracking app that focuses on fast food. There are 5,972 menu items from 55 top fast food restaurants and that list is growing fast. This app gives you the ability to sort foods and arrange restaurants in a way that makes sense to you, while tracking calories, fat, carbs, fiber, and protein.

Food Diary Calorie Counter
$2.99
Keep track of 90 days worth of daily food intake, while calculating your Body Mass Index (BMI) with this app. You can also set a target number of calories to eat each day, enabling you to manage your weight based on your gender, height, weight, and age.

Calorie Track
$2.99
This no frills app includes data from the United States Department of Agriculture and allows you to set calorie and fat goals, and graph your food intake history to measure trends and progress 

Calorie Minder
$3.99
Calorie Minder is a web based app that has been carefully designed around user experience, giving you access to over 7,000 foods and 32 kinds of exercise. You also have the ability to add custom foods, meals and exercises so that adding these items throughout the day is easy. What you then get are detailed nutrition reports that identify which foods are supplying you with the most fat, calories, carbs and more.

@hallicious

Photo by: .schill

 

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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.

A Bugg’s Life (Volume 2)

by Laura Tabler on March 23, 2009 · Comments

As you may have read in my first post, I joined the bodybugg revolution about 6 weeks ago, and I am a huge fan of the real-time feedback that it provides. I think this is the reason that the program is working so well for me. 

We live in a time where instant feedback is readily available in many industries and formats. We see constant Twitter streams and Facebook updates to see what our friends, colleagues, and acquaintances are up to and thinking about, and we get our news through RSS feeds that constantly push the latest and greatest information right to us…
 
…but where is the real-time feedback on my health?  How am I supposed to figure out how the things I do today affect my body (both today and in the future)? 
 
Enter the BodyBugg, which helps me see the impact of the foods I eat and the movements I make on a daily basis. This isn’t just a tool for weight loss. It also has programs for people who want to gain weight or maintain their current weight. It’s all about the balance of calories consumed vs. calories burned. If you want to lose weight, you need to burn more calories than you consume. Want to gain weight? Eat and drink more calories than you burn (which is what I was doing before…although unintentionally).
 
It’s been about 6 weeks since I began the program, and I am still going strong. To date, I’ve lost 9 pounds, and am still vigilant about logging my food entries every single day (even though I must admit that I was a bit skeptical at first about the time commitment that it would take to do this). While logging food and drink is not mandatory, I think refusing to do so would cause you to miss out on one of the main benefits of the program: learning the tools you need to sustain a lifestyle change. I could go on for several paragraphs about this topic, so I will save that one for another post.
 
For now, I want to go back to the importance of real-time feedback on my own body and my own health. I can’t help but think if we really saw the dangerous effects of smoking that cigarette or eating that jelly doughnut every morning, we would stop doing those things (or at least stop doing them as often). Can you imagine the impact watching your lungs get darker with every drag or watching your arteries clog with every bite of that jelly doughnut?
 
I think visualizing the effects of what we do to our bodies is what it will take before some of us will actually get it. We know smoking and consistently eating fatty foods is bad for us, but we still do it every single day. Why? I would argue that since we don’t see the effects of these unhealthy behaviors today (or even tomorrow or next week), we are content to remain blissfully ignorant. “I’m 30 and I smoke a pack a day, but I’m not really affected besides the occasional coughing fit. So what if I get lung cancer at 65 – I’ll deal with it then.”
 
Thankfully, visualization doesn’t have to be as drastic as the blackened lung or the clogged artery (although it may take these types of scare tactics to finally convince some people). The bodybugg visually shows me my own personal teeter totter of how many more calories I need to burn to help offset my food intake on any given day – based upon that day’s food log. For now, this seems to be all the real-time feedback I need to help me stay on target with my weight loss goals. The real test will be to see if I continue to sustain my current habits and stick with the program over the long term…but again, that’s for another post.

Photo by: bardgabbard

Popularity: 9% [?]

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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.

A Bugg’s Life (Volume 1)

by Laura Tabler on March 4, 2009 · Comments

Several weeks ago, I was spending a normal evening at home with my dogs, waiting for my husband to get home from class. It must have been a Tuesday night, because I was watching The Biggest Loser (hello my name is Laura and I am a reality TV junkie). During the show, Bob (one of the trainers), was shown at a computer with one of the contestants, talking about how the contestant was tracking calories with something called the BodyBugg. Unlike other product placement bits on the show, nobody really went into the details of the BodyBugg infomercial-style. They just mentioned it briefly and went on with the show.

Since I work in the healthcare industry and am easily awed by new gadgets, I was intrigued enough to do a little research on this device. Videos on the site explain that the BodyBugg has sensor technology that gives you real-time feedback on how many calories you’ve burned and also lets you track how many calories you consume. The program also allows you to set weight loss goals and at any given time it can tell you how many calories you need to burn and how many calories you can still consume in order to reach your weight loss goals. As it says on the video, “You decide – move more, eat less, or both!” 
 
The compelling thing about this system is that it really plays on the idea of trade-offs. Realistically, not very many people are willing to give up on all of their "vices" (smoking, drinking, eating fatty foods, etc.), but wouldn’t it be great to know how much improvement you could make by giving up just 1 of those vices? Or maybe not entirely giving up a vice, but just using more moderation. I think this idea of trade-offs can be a big key to weight loss because people don’t have to necessarily commit to a certain diet. By using the idea of trade-offs and having real-time feedback at your fingertips, you know that if you choose to eat that extra piece of pizza, you’re going to need to make up for it by burning x number of additional calories. On the flip side, if you’ve had a good day of calorie burning, it’s ok to eat some dessert as a reward. 
 
I think people would be much more likely to stick with this type of weight loss plan rather than one of unrealistic diets or food deprivation, which we all know is not really sustainable across time. Research proves that lifestyle changes are much more sustainable than going on the “I can only eat grapefruit and chicken broth” diet (ok I totally made that up, but you get the idea).
 
So…I bought a BodyBugg, and have been extremely pleased with the results so far. I could tell that my clothes were fitting more loosely within the first 2 weeks of using it, and have already lost 6 pounds as I am finishing up my 3rd week in the program. 
 
Yay – more real-time feedback! 
 
Since I think feedback loops are so important, I am going to continue blogging through my BodyBugg journey (hence the volume 1 in the title). I also want to hear from you. Is anyone else out there on the BodyBugg bandwagon? What other weight loss strategies / techniques / solutions have worked for you?
 

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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.