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deskjockey925
Posts: 4,971 Member
This is the place to store helpful tools, big ideas, links to content, graphics, and any other content that you want our members to easily find again.
So please jump in! Add to the collection by posting something that you don’t want to forget or struggle to find again.
Copied from previous months
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Podcasts
- Half size me podcast
- Brain over binge
- Workit mama- podcast.
Books & Newsletters
- James clear - Atomic habits for creating new habits.
- Sadguru - For Overall mental well being.
- A Liberated Mind by Steven Hayes.
- The Diet Trap by Jason Lillis.
- Cookbook "Be A Plant-Based Woman Warrior: Live Fierce, Stay Bold, Eat Delicious".
- The Pump Club email newsletter and podcast (Spotify) by Arnold Schwartzenege
- Mollie katzen’s cookbook
- Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Quit Emotional Eating. Free yourself from your addiction to food.
Websites & apps
- www.fitnessblender.com (strength training)
- Youtube's Ted Talk by Tim Urban "Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator"
- Happy Scale app (Apple) or Libra app (Android). creates a trend line up or down so that daily fluctuations don’t cause angst!
- TED Talks: Wendy Suzuki - The brain-changing benefits of exercise
- https://pahlabfitness.com/blog/ (great perimenopause resource)
- https://www.seniorlifestyle.com/resources/blog/infographic-top-10-chair-yoga-positions-for-seniors/ (chair yoga)
- https://www.hybridcalisthenics.com/routine Get healthy, fit, and strong with very little equipment.
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This is from the March 4 opener by @henridw2095 with info on food tracking, which a couple people requested we add to the monthly resources. @Maya440 Do you think you could move this forward to the coming months, along with the other resources?
A few benefits of food tracking (some shamelessly stolen from the internet):
- Implement a sustainable diet plan (to support any diet goal you have)
- Achieve calorie goals (and consequently weight goals)
- Understand your current eating habits - e.g. I used to unintentionally deprive myself during the day only to overeat at night.
- Learn about the nutritious values of your food choices - e.g. are your foods packed with cholesterol or sugar?
- Learn to be accountable - e.g. are you really eating more/worse than you think?
- Achieve certain macro goals.
- Help you distribute your calories and macros throughout the day.
- Use tracking as a tool to plan ahead.
- Identify what works and what doesn't work - e.g what makes you feel energetic and what makes you feel bad?
- Build mindfulness and awareness around food - e.g. do you overeat at certain times of the day?
Strategies for how and when to track:
- Track accurately (see more tips for how to do this in the nested spoiler below)
- Track what you're planning to eat before you eat it. Some members pre-plan entire days, but it's a good idea to at least track foods before you put them on your plate or in your mouth.
- Eating out makes tracking hard. Tricks UAC members have shared in the past include the following:
- Avoid eating out!
- Eat at restaurants that make nutritional information available (chains in the US), allowing you to track and eat according to your plan.
- Try to recreate the meal in MFP later or guesstimate the calories and use "quick add." It's inaccurate, but it's better than not tracking and overeating.
- Use your judgment, and don't eat everything on your plate if the portions are large (take some home or leave some).
- Consider repeating a core set of meals to take advantage of recipe and meal functions and your tracking history (which is sortable by "most recent," "most frequent," and "A-Z" or "Z-A"), making tracking very efficient.
- Check MFP database entries for accuracy at least the first time you track something. Even the green checkmark does not guarantee accuracy. You can check entries against each other, against container labels, or food databases. Some entries are shockingly wrong. Especially if you care about certain micronutrients, ensure they're entered and accurate since some people only enter macros, or calories and carbs.
How to track food REALLY accurately:
- Most of us use MFP, but you can use pencil and paper or other apps, such as Cronometer.
- Consider investing in a food scale and some measuring spoons and cups.
- Ideally, the food scale can be set to zero ("tare") between measurements and measure negative numbers. You can set the scale to zero and add other foods to your plate/dish. I also like to weigh portions I take out of containers (in negative numbers), such as taking out peanut better from the jar (I get to lick the spoon this way).
- For cooks, use the recipe function to enter the recipes you cook. Entering recipes takes a bit of practice. For recipes I make often, I update the recipe the next time I make it with new weights.
- Geek tips for recipes/batch cooking: I weigh and measure all the ingredients as they go into the dish, noting things down with pen and paper. After I finish the dish (exception below), I weigh the entire dish in grams and use that number as my serving size. For example, I just made 2500 g of lentil stew that I am storing in a container, so my recipe has 2500 servings. When I eat 500 g for dinner, my serving size is 500. The cronometer app has that function from the get-go, but you can do it manually in MFP.
- Keep alternative ingredients in the recipe, but set the amount to 0 (possible in the iPhone app) or 0.0001 if 0 is impossible. That way, you will have that ingredient ready the next time you make that recipe.
- When making "sticky/lossy recipes," such as hummus, weigh ingredients as they go into the food processor, recording the weight of the dish going in rather than coming out (when 10% might be stuck in the food container after processing).
- For meal preppers: use masking tape and a marker to date and record portion size on your freezer/storage containers.
- Consider splurging on the "prime" membership if you want the food scanner. It does not necessarily ensure that the entries are correct, though.
- Nutrition can change with cooking, use cooked database entries, if available (e.g. baked sweet potato), if not available, I use the raw food and ignore the error.
How to set your calorie goal
[*] If you're unsure how many net calories to consume, you can use MFP to come up with a number, or a body weight planner, such as https://www.niddk.nih.gov/bwp
[*] I would recommend starting with a reasonable number and fine-tuning your approach after a few weeks (repeatedly).
How to track exercise accurately and what to do with the information:
- Tracking exercise accurately is challenging, but options include an activity tracker (such as the Apple watch) or going with guesses based on research and past activity.
- There are many different approaches to figuring the exercise calories into your budget. People get passionate about this, and it's best to experiment here. Go with your gut and see what works for you! My personal choice is to guess exercise calories based on research and past activity tracking and to eat them all back to arrive at my intended deficit.
Tracking outcomes allows you to use your food data to figure out if what you're doing works and to tweak your approach over time.
Ideas for what outcomes to track:
- Weight (you'd expect to lose 1 pound a week if you eat at a 500 kcal deficit a day, so if you haven't lost any weight but tracked accurately, you found your maintenance calories :P - congratulations)
- Body Measurements (you can track these in MFP)
- Moods (use the notes function)
- Heart health: exercise recovery (objective, or cardio recovery in your phone's health app if you use one), Cardio Fitness (VO2 max, I just discovered that my phone tracks that when I wear my Apple watch), blood pressure, resting heart rate…
- Body composition, if you own or have access to a body fat scale or other methods.
- Sleep tracking
- Cycle tracking
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@learningmoments* Macros are a percentage of the total calories. Where do they get the grams. (ie. 100g of protein)?
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Let me see if I can help you or confuse you even more.
"Macros" is short for macronutrients, it is used to describe the nutrients your body needs and is usually classified as carbohydrates, fat and protein.
Macros are normally expressed as a percentage or grams.
There are many calculators available to help determine what your Macros should be but it also depends on your goals. Here's one https://www.calculator.net/macro-calculator.html
My calorie goal to lose about a pound a week is 1,650. My macros in percentage form are as follows
36% protein or 594 calories (1650*.36)
40% fat or 660 calories (1650 * .40)
24% carb or 396 calories (1650 * .24)
To get the grams - you divide each by the number of calories per gram. Carbs and Proteins are 4 calories per gram and Fats are 9. So...
36% protein or 594 calories (1650*.36) 594/4 = 148.5 or I round to 150g
40% fat or 660 calories (1650 * .40) 660/9 = 73.33 or I round to 73g
24% carb or 396 calories (1650 * .24) 394/4= 98.5 or I round to 98g
Now balancing your food to hit all 3 macros AND calories is a form of art or a jigsaw puzzle. And that is where pre-logging helps as you can add, subtract, change portions sizes etc to meet your goals.
I personally aim for calories and protein and try to stay under the carb allotment. I don't try to balance the meal but rather balance the day.
I don't change my eating habits based on my exercise.
Since my main focus is calories and protein, I start there for meal planning.
I have a protein smoothie almost every day (berries, 1/2 banana, spinach (or other greens), oikos yogurt, and protein powder).
I then plan my dinner - again starting with the protein. Usually Ground Turkey, Fish (Cod, Salmon, catfish), pork, filet, chicken. Fish x2 a week, beef x1 or less a week and then the rest. I couple my protein with a veggie (salad, asparagus, broccoli, zucchini, spinach etc). Then i look to see where I am with protein and calories and then start the balancing act.
I hope this helps or at least brought more questions to mind
And of course, this describes my perfect world, which of course, isn't!!!
Cultivate Long Term Fitness
https://www.hybridcalisthenics.com/routine
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Fyi reference (always wondered)
What is a sedentary number of steps?
Sedentary is less than 5,000 steps per day. Low active is 5,000 to 7,499 steps per day. Somewhat active is 7,500 to 9,999 steps per day. Active is more than 10,000 steps per day.
https://www.10000steps.org.au › co...
Counting Your Steps - 10000 Steps
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Jana2020 mentioned the book "Stop Self-Sabotage: Six steps to unlock your true motivation, harness your willpower and get out of your own way" by Dr. Judy Ho on the check-in thread and how working through it helped her.
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I have been doing some workouts by Caroline Jordan on YouTube. She focuses on low impact for different limitations of movement and for various lifestyles, eg. for diabetics, seated exercises and those recovering from injuries.
My favourite workout is a 20 minute walking workout that incorporates walking and HIIT aerobic exercises raising heart rate and walking just over a mile depending on the level you do the workout. Plus this workout is low impact on my joints 💪🏻🚶🏼♀️0
