The reason I'm blogging here today is because of the curiosity I've received from many people since I've purchased a new fitness gadget. I've never been into the latest fitness crazes and gadgets. I just find that if you have a proper balance of eating healthy and exercising, you're fine. Well that became a problem for me...actually it kind of started when I was in the midst of the Cre Comm program I recently completed. A lot of former students told me it would be really hard to keep a routine with friends, family, working out and everything in between. At first I thought well I will just MAKE time. I would soon find out if I wanted to MAKE time, that time would have to be between the hours of 1 AM and 5 AM....so basically I chose sleep over that.
Long story short, I went from that phase, to the summer 'work and party all the time' phase and right into working a full time plus two part time jobs phase. So basically that's where I'm at right now.
Stuck...yet again. Still finding myself so busy that making time sometimes doesn't seem like an option because I would rather sleep. During Cre Comm, I drank endless coffees, energy drinks, and alcohol, and ate enough breakfast sandwiches, chocolate, and chicken fingers to last me four life times. That kind of shit begins to take a toll on you and your body. So recently I've made a few changes...
With the advice of my new workout buddy Alex Wenger, I ended my 'no buying new fitness gadgets' policy and bought myself a Jawbone UP fitness band. What is this? Well, only the latest and greatest...no I'm kidding. But seriously. It's a band you wear that tracks your sleep patterns, food intake, activity levels, and calories burned vs consumed in a day. That's the basics of it. What I've found it does for me is so much more than that.
I want to break this band down into the three main areas that it focuses on and how I've found them to work/not work for me:
1) Sleep
Ahh sleep. How I love thee. People keep asking me how does this band know you're asleep? Well your pulse changes when you fall asleep, and it changes from when you hit your light sleep vs your deep sleep. (I'm not pretending I'm a doctor, this is what the man in the store told me) So this photo here shows how the sleep pattern is tracked.
Orange = awake, light blue = light sleep and dark blue = deep sleep. I'm supposed to get 7-8 hours a night so for the most part I have been doing very well in that sense, which I've also noticed has made a change in how I feel during the day. I will also make sure I'm in bed by 10:30 now so that I can wake up refreshed at 6:30 am.
2) Eating
I love this tracker is because now I'm seeing what I eat every day. Of course I KNOW what I eat, but now it's being broken down into a food score. The better I eat, the better my food score. It also shows how much you should be active, based on the diet you're eating. So basically if I have a cheat day, I need to be way more active.
I'm noticing the trend starting to go towards healthy because I'm conscious of what I'm actually eating and how much I'm eating of it. When I write in there I ate a chicken breast with kale salad, I feel like I'm invincible. And then I go ahead and eat cookies (seriously, they're my weakness) and just hate how that looks on there. My only downfall for this, is sometimes I forget to enter my breakfast in there because I'm rushing in the morning, so it seems like I eat way too many calories for lunch so it kind of throws my kilter off. But I know as long as I'm eating at the right times it's all good. I've replaced a lot of my unhealthy cravings with things like almonds, peanut butter/fruit, and even just adding fruit or essential oils to my water to make myself feel full after meals.
3) Activity Level/Step Tracker
Another reason I love this band, is because I work at a desk 8:30-4:30 5 days a week. And then I work for 15 hours on the weekends where again I'm sitting throughout the day. That's a lot of sitting down and doing nothing and when I get home sometimes I would feel so tired and sluggish. As much as I tried to get up and move once every hour, sometimes I would just get so caught up in my work that I would forget to move around and then before I knew it, I had been sitting for 4-5 hours. You can set the Jawbone to vibrate and notify you when you have been inactive for too long. It can be set for every 15, 30, 45 or 60 minutes. So since I knew I was having a problem with this, I decided to start off by setting it for every 30 minutes. Even if I take a walk around the building, or go walk upstairs to fill up my water bottle, I know I'm doing something better. (in fact, my band just vibrated as I was writing this and it still scares the crap out of me, but it's an awesome SILENT reminder)
The band also tracks your steps. The average person is supposed to try to walk 10,000 steps per day. Now that I have this band, I made a long route around our building that I have to get up and walk once every half hour. Usually by the time I leave work I've got about 4000-5000 steps depending on what else I'm doing. Now that we have a treadmill at home, I will go on that for about 40-60 minutes depending how I'm feeling/which shows of mine are on that night and that usually gets me close if not up to 10,000.
So all in all, I definitely am happy with this band. It helps that I now have two really good friends who are on this adventure too, and I gotta say getting those workout Snapchats every day or being able to send them feels so good. I am not trying to promote the Jawbone here, people simply asked how it's been working for me so I'm telling them. If you are looking to get back into a routine or feel healthier, tracking what you do is a big step to push you in the right direction. I have set goals and put them in this band, so I would like to see how quickly I can achieve them now that I'm being so conscious of what I'm doing. For now I know I'm on the right track, and I can't wait to start feeling like a healthy human being again.
No comments:
Post a Comment