accountability - Keyboard Athletes

Geek Fit Friday – Lose It!

Conceptually, weight loss is an easy idea. Take in less calories than we expend. From there, the wheels tend to come off.

Anyone (or anything) that can tell you they know exactly how many calories you burn in any activity is flat-out lying to you. The best anyone can do is make an educated guessed based on the “average” person – however you define that. Current weight, muscle mass, metabolism, and how hard you are working all get factored in.

So, the only thing we can REALLY do is count our intake. The National Weight Control Registry shows that individuals that manage to lose 30+ pounds and keep it off 5+ years eat between 1400 and 1800 calories per day. That is a tried and true model for success, so I think it’s a good one to work from. (NOTE: They also exercise an hour a day – it’s not ALL about the food.)

My favorite iPhone app for tracking calories is an application called Lose It!

It’s Free
It allows you to save your meals so you can easily repeat from day to day
It allows you to create your own foods
It lets you choose what nutrients you want to track (I like to track my protein)
It has a fantastic food database. I’m super-impressed with the food database
It remembers the portion size you last used with that food
It lets you enter your weight and weight loss goals and helps you determine your daily caloric target (which you can also override)

It also lets you enter your exercise, but I have to admit, I have yet to use that feature.

P.S. If you really can’t live without a number to put to your training session, you can assume 400 cals for good, solid hour of work. Yep, that’s it.

Internal choices are weaker than those dictated by the outside world

One of the things that is required of me as a part of the Z-Health executive team is that we all have coaches to hold us accountable in various parts of our lives. We just started this program this year, and it’s shaping up to be pretty powerful.

I have the same commitment with my teen mentoring program. We have to set two goals each academic semester, and then do weekly check-ins to ensure we are making progress towards those goals — and we have people to hold us accountable if we are not.

Right now, I’m in the midst of a book for the upcoming Z-Health 9S Sustenance & Spirit course that talks a lot about the neurology of decision-making, which talks about this same thing as well.

So, when I ran across the following study, I was intrigued.

Internal choices are weaker than those dictated by the outside world. An excerpt is below, or follow the link previous to read the entire abstract.

“Our study has two implications for our understanding of human volition. First, our brains contain a mechanism to go back and change our mind about our choices, after a choice is made but before the action itself. Our internal decisions are not set in stone, but can be re-evaluated right up to the last moment. Second, changing an internal choice in this way seems to be easier than changing a choice guided by external instructions.

“We often think about our own internal decisions as having the strength of conviction, but our results suggest that the brain is smart enough to make us flexible about what we want. The ability to flexibly adjust our decisions about what we do in the current situation is a major component of intelligence, and has a clear survival value.”

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Geek Fit Friday – Lose It!

Internal choices are weaker than those dictated by the outside world

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