A Year in the Life of Organization

In 2012 I am on a mission to organize my life more completely. I am using the Friday section of this blog to announce tools I plan to use and chronicle the changes I am making. Here is one…

This year I am on a mission to better organize my life. I realized that to be successful in my ministry it had to be done. One of the things that desperately needed to change was my weight. I was constantly tired. I never felt good. I knew that I needed to get the pounds down both for my health and my productivity.

When I begin 2012 I was somewhere over 315 lbs. I don’t know where I really was because when I started our scale only went to 299 lbs., and then it stopped. After working on weight loss for a week or more I decided I needed to know so I bought a scale. I began at 315.? something lbs. As of this writing (March 6) I have lost 26 lbs.

When I began this process I did not want it to be a diet. Dieting in my mind leads you to loose weight for a period of time. I wanted this to be a lifestyle change. I wanted to change my eating patterns and my lack of exercise. I knew I would have fail days, but I wanted them to rare and not the norm. I began with some goals. I wanted to get to 290 lbs. by March. I was able to accomplish that goal. With that I wanted to begin walking and then running. I haven’t yet done that, but plan to soon. I am trying to figure out when the best time in my day will be for that.

I feel I have done pretty well at my lifestyle change and am excited with the changes. One thing I can attribute is something called FatSecret. I was looking for an app that would help me manage my weight loss. I downloaded the first one I found and soon fell in love. I also found the internet version of FatSecret and fell even more in love. FatSecret is an amazing tool. Between the app and the website I am able to track and record my food intake, my exercise, my weight loss, create recipes, journal and connect in community.

The best part of FatSecret is the ability to keep track of my food intake. I can do this multiple ways. I am able to use the website and search for or enter the food I have eaten for the day. I can enter it by searching their amazing database by food types, brands, restaurants, and many more. I can also enter it by using my phone in similar ways as well as using the barcode scanner on my phone and then selecting the number of servings I am consuming. This is truly a neat way to use the tool. One the website and my phone I am able to see something like this ~

On the day of this writing this is the food that I had already consumed for the day. This has become amazingly helpful through this process.

There is so much you can use FatSecret for. I plan to share more throughout the year about all you can do with FatSecret. I hope this serves as an introduction to an amazing free tool you can use online at your continence.

 

The Photo used above belongs to Jonathan D. Blundell’s Photostream