Love the app run keeper. I haven't been to the gym in a few weeks. My car has been on the blitz and husband has to fix it himself instead of taking it some where and getting it done quick (aurgh). I have a elliptical and some workout tapes but Im not so motivated to use them. I think I need to start getting motivated and workout, even if its at home. I just miss the gym.

I am pretty much just a walker. I do a minimum of 3.6 miles every morning before work in my neighborhood. If I get out early enough I will stretch that out to 4.5 or 5.5 depending on the route and my motivation. I do longer on Saturday mornings did a personal best 8.9 miles last Saturday. I have been starting to run parts of my normal circuit and did 12 minute miles average yesterday.
My company is big into the wellness thing. We have a .5 mi. loop around our building and parking lot that I will do 2 laps on when I think I can take 20 minutes. Minimum of once a day. They also just gave everyone a FitBit and have built some competition into it with stack rankings for each department and location.
I also use Runkeeper on my morning walks but not at work. The average pace announcement every 5 minutes is my pusher. I try to keep it around 15:30 per mile.
Since I started tracking food and steps on November 10th, 2015 I have lost 9.2 pounds which pretty much on target for the 2 pounds per week goal that I set. I had lost 21.2 pounds since January 1st just through changes to my diet and occasionally walking with no plan and no tracking of diet or steps.
You can do it through just walking for sure. What I have above may seem pretty formulaic but in the end it is still just walking. I would encourage anyone who is wondering if they can lose weight through just walking. If you have the time (90 mins.), you can lose a pound a week just walking and another pound by cutting 500 cals a day from your diet. At least that has worked in my case.

bibliocephalus wrote: »

These are great, and inspiring. My surgery was Tuesday, you guys have me chomping at the bit to hurry up and recover so I can get back out there!

I'm curious about the FitBit. Do you use separately from MFP, and log the information that you get from it into MFP? I looked on a FitBit forum here, and it seemed that the people that linked it up with MFP had a lot of problems with it. I'd prefer to just use it for exercise, and keep tracking my food on here, is that something you can do?

Fitbit and MFP work fine together. You can track your food on MFP and it will transfer the calories over to your FitBit dashboard and app. The mealtime calories will be shown on FitBit (Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, etc.) but the food breakdown will not. The calories that you burn on FitBit in terms of steps will transfer over to MFP.

If you use another app to track exercise like running or walking (MapMyRun, Runkeeper, etc.), link them to MFP and do not link them to FitBit or it will double count the burn. I would also enable "negative calorie adjustment" in your diary settings if you wear the FitBit all of the time. It will give you a much more accurate reading on where you are for the day on your burned calories.

I use a very simple formula of netting 1000 less calories a day than I used to. That is 2 pounds per week. I break that up into 2 halves. 500 less calories eaten and 500 more calories burned. You can use that as a lever and if you want to eat 700 less calories, you only have to burn 300 or vice versa. You can also drop it to 1 pound a week and do 250/250 or just burn 500 and eat your sedentary burn (2200 cal./day in my case).

I am doing strictly weight loss right now so this is pretty simple. I am not getting overly crazy about the carb/fat/protein breakdown. I have cut out added sugars so I do keep the carbs in my periphery. I will start getting a little more granular as I hit goal weight and go into muscle building and changing my body composition. Right now, what I am doing works for me. I only joined MFP a couple of weeks ago so it does not show but I have lost 35 pounds since 1/1/14 and 24 pounds since 9/28/14 which was my last checkup.

This is all so helpful, thank you guys!

Busybee, so do you just enter the activity numbers from your fitbit manually into MFP under excercise? And Eeemerson, which fitbit model are you using?

Alas, I have really felt my mood and overall well being plummet which each day of inactivity- I am toying with the idea of going to the gym to use the arm bike today. I still have stitches in, but the aircast would be protecting everything. . .still undecided on that.

Happy holidays to all who celebrate, happy winter to those who don't!

I'm getting a Fitbit Flex as a belated Christmas present. I walk and/or jog on the beach and I do a lot of walking at work so I'm curious as to how many steps I take in a typical day and how many more I may need to hit 10,000 a day.