The company I work for has been going with the trend of a wellness awareness program that is permeating so many of our larger companies these days. They will reimburse employees that are active participants in this program and give them a certain monetary figure at the end of the year if they fulfill a predetermined amount of points. You earn these points throughout the year by, well, by doing healthy things or learning about them. They have been doing this a few years and provide a website and biometric screenings so you have an idea of where you are starting and to give you some points to get you motivated and to begin.
I've used the website they have provided and have been well over the points needed to bring home the monetary benefits at the end of those years. This year they have done the same but the website has changed slightly. To be perfectly honest, to me, they dumbed it up. They made it less than it was. I was looking and hoping for more and it seems they have given me less. It seems now there is less access to articles and the tools are less informative. They used to provide a food journal tool that could calculate your calories. They had an exercise tool to track your work-outs and calories burned. They had a report that could put the two together to see where you stacked up that day.
They don't have that anymore. Was that really too complicated? Now the food journal is just a notepad to put down what you put in...to your mouth, I guess, without any nutritional values or caloric data. There isn't anywhere you can log your exercise. This left me searching outside my companies wellness website. (Uh-Oh - I heard you).
I did some searching and found a free site (caloriecount.com). Ta-da! It has a food journal with a huge database to search not only the calories in foods but their nutritional value as well. It has a place to enter workouts. It has a place to track water you drink and weight you are at and where you want to be. It has forums for motivation, questions, age groups, on and on.
I've been using it for 7 days. Yeah, I've been logging my food and exercise every day. They have you complete each day when you are done and it will go into a feed with everyone else that they call the Calorie Camp. People will comment about their day, whether it was good or if they blew it. It can be very real and it makes for some very good motivation. It can be especially interesting when I view it in the early morning and I get all the people from Britain ending their days.
I joined one age group (50 somethings) forum and I noticed one of the topics was titled...List Your 5 Best Reasons for Losing Weight. It sounded like fun so I read through the entries and since I was feeling a little cheeky at the time I decided I would add my own. It went exactly like this.
Hmmm...reasons to lose weight. Let's give it a go.
1. I'm already old (56) and can't control that, so how about I try to do something I can control? I can...I can control it. I can too!
2. To give me something positive to obsess about like finding healthier and better tasting food alternatives instead of eating stuff I know isn't good to begin with.
3. So I can find reasons to go out and run instead of reasons I should stay in and eat and then feel bad about not going out to run.
4. So I can take 10 items into the dressing room and buy all of them because I love them or put all 10 back because I changed my mind and not because any of them didn't fit correctly.
5. So I'll be the best looking and healthiest person in the hospital when I die. We all will, 'ya know, so why not look and feel the best!
I was surprised when I got a message back from someone who had read it and said, "I like your moxie." Well. Now. I'm not exactly sure I knew I had any moxie but, yeah, I'll take that as a positive since I was still feeling cheeky. (It must be because I had been reading all those Brits' end of day posts).
I won't get any wellness points for this. It won't apply to my company's program or add to the monetary benefit at the end of the year. But I also wouldn't have been able to find out that I actually have been eating too few carbs (Yes - can you believe that!) these past seven days. That I could actually up my protein a smidgen and I don't have to worry at all about my fat intake. I could probably benefit from a bit more of that, too. So this site has been a great find for me even though I have strayed from the beaten path (yet again).
I also wouldn't have known I had any moxie at all. That alone adds points in my book.
TT
0 comments:
Post a Comment