Exercise Goals

January seems to be the month where everyone sets lofty goals. Gyms and Fitness Centers round the world laugh at all the new clients who come in enthusiastic and with high hopes, only to crash and burn within a few weeks. Most having signed up for a long-term membership and now that is money down the drain. I wonder if those gyms ever call clients late February/early March to see where they are and ask if there is anything they can do to get that member back into the gym and maybe started again on the road in a more logical way.


My friend while not a gym rat, decided that this is the year. Life is on the upswing and the next obstacle is lack of exercise and proper eating. Then she mentioned she found myfitnesspal.com and had signed up and she thought it would be helpful to just track her food intake for a while so that when she met with her doctor later she could at least say these are the problems I’m having, this is what I’ve been eating and this is what I want to check out. Food diary. Yep, all the “experts” say that is the best way to track your calories in. Hmmm, I thought, that sounds familiar so after trying for about 10 minutes, I finally remembered my log in information for that site. It reminded me it had been 6 months since I’d last logged on. Yeah, don’t be a nag. So in solidarity with my friend, I said okay, I’ll do it too. Maybe if I’m actually doing it with someone, we friended each other so we see each other’s daily logs I will be motivated to do this more than a week. I’ve put my food info in ever night, and have been a little sad to see that I’ve gone over my calorie number for the day. But then I picked an arbitrary number and haven’t gone over by much. At this point we are still in the adjustment phase so I’m allowing myself wiggle room/learning curve space.

Last night, after only 4 days, the lightbulb went off in my head. I’m a little slow sometimes. But after catching up on my food diary entry, I put in my exercise entries for the past few days. I’ve been a little lax on the exercise too. Then I looked at the summary. Holy bat poop batman, it actually deducts from your total the calories you burned! So now it is telling me that while I may not be putting a ton of effort into my exercise, at least what little I’m doing is a visible positive result.

Maybe I’ll be able to keep this up more than 2 weeks after all . .