You can teach an old dog new tricks

Since I've made significant changes in my lifestyle, I've been learning, or relearning, things that I'm shocked and stunned I never "got" before.

I like this new learning though. I've been learning a lot about calories and more importantly how many calories are in things.  Let me tell you, it's a shock to the system when you look up calories for something you used to eat on a regular basis and find out its your total amount of daily calories you're allowed now. Ugh.

I track my calories intake and burned through myfitnesspal.com.  I track all my food and water intake there too.  Its a nice little website and iPhone app that allows you to see your progress and keep track of what you're doing daily. 

MyFitnessPal has a huge database of food and exercise.  As I understand it, when you put in your body information, weight, height, age, measurements etc, that it calculates your burned calories based on that and the amount of time you do an exercise.  For example, if I put in 30 minutes of elliptical it says I burn 522 calories.

Woot.

Here's my issue though.

Said elliptical rider - when weight and age are put in - says I burn 282 calories.

Naturally I want to believe MyFitnessPal. I mean who wouldn't.

So to figure out just what I am burning, I bought a heart rate monitor that has a calorie setting.  Today I finally remembered to turn the calorie tracker on. It said in 30 minutes of elliptical I burned 398 calories.

522 or 282 or 398...which to believe.

I'm definitely more inclined to believe the personal heart rate monitor than the other two. 

I can understand just how hard it is now to figure out how much you eat and how much you have to work out to keep yourself in shape.  I know there's a happy medium for every person. I'm just glad that I'm finally figuring mine out.

If you haven't noticed the gadget on the side of the blog, I've lost 16 lbs to date.  I've lost a bunch of inches in the hips, waist and chest area. In fact, I joked with a friend this weekend about having to stuff my bra again since my chest is shrinking.

I'm also learning that working out is really not that bad. I'm finding I miss it if I go too many days without it.  I am only doing 30 minutes of cardio right now, and that's appearing to be enough for now.  I have noticed that my heart rate doesn't increase nearly as fast as it used to. I used to just look at an elliptical and my heart rate would shoot to 140. Now at least I can be on the elliptical for 10-15 minutes moderately before it hits that rate.

All in all I feel good. I can see the progress and I have learned a lot about myself and my habits. For example, last Thursday night when I got the call that Lourdes had passed away, my first thought was, "I need something to eat." And I didn't mean an apple. I wanted something comforting. I was really glad I didn't have anything "comforting" to eat in the house.