Motivate Myself

For Valentines Day my sweet mom left a card with a Kohls, Barnes & Noble, & Starbucks gift in it on my windshield. I immediately went shopping and this is what I picked up. "The 3-Day Cleanse", which is a book explaining this method of detox, "Flat Belly Diet Cookbook", Earth Therapeutics Foot Scrub, Adidas socks, Laure Conrad Wishbone earrings, Revlon 610 Lily nail polish.

I'll share recipes and information from the books. :) And if I have great results with the foot scrub I'll share that too. :)

And last week, on Friday, I purchased a calorie counting pedometer. When I tracked my calories, I always underestimated how much I burned because I didn't want to cheat myself in the long run. It's pink, its a watch, and it tracks heart rate, calories burned, steps taken, distance, and it stores it all for 7 days so you can see how active you are and at what times of the day! I'm in love with it! Now I really should not have bought it yet because I need to pay rent and I'm way short. After buying my boyfriends Bday present I was already $300 short on rent though so I figured I'd just buy it anyway. I'm hoping desperately my tax return comes so I don't have to tell him I don't have the rent money quite yet. (I was told it should have arrived by Friday at the latest). The watch is from New Balance and cost $45.

But it's been so enlightening! I figured if I worked an 8 hour day, I might be active for like 5 of those hours, so I'd tell loseit.com that I was "Walking 2.0 mph for 5 hours" and that would total 745 calories. If it was a lazy day at work, I'd even put that I walked 3 hours out of 8. With the watch, I now know that I burn about 1160 on a pretty slow day at work. So I really was underestimating. :) This makes the whole shock of net calories being at -1000  a bit easier to understand because if somebody is active throughout the day, it shouldn't be all that hard to burn as much as is needed to lose 2 lbs per week.

I think it really helps me to be consumed with fitness and health. Having the watch on is a constant reminder that I should be up and moving or at the gym because the amount of calories I burn sitting is, well, very little. And reading all these books about healthy eating is motivating too because it reminds me that so many other people are living and breathing this lifestyle and I could be one of them if I just choose to stay focused. :)