Tools for Success

As the title to this posting suggests, I am covering what I deem as the tools for success in this life change. This is not intended to lay out the requisite mental and emotional tools; mental toughness and motivation are baseline requirements to be successful in an endeavor such as this. Instead, I am going to focus on the more pragmatic.

First, I bought a bathroom scale. I have not owned a bathroom scale in well over two years, and it certainly shows. Perhaps if I had this mechanism to help keep me in check I wouldn't have let myself go as far as I have.

Second, I bought a food scale. Everyone has their main struggle in maintaining a healthy lifestyle (be it smoking, living a sedentary life, etc.), and mine is by far portion control. It is amazing how full you can get on 5 ounces of chicken; it is equally as amazing how large chicken breasts actually are out of the package (10-12 ounces is common). On a side note, what do these chickens look like? I've seen a chicken, and 24 ounces of breast meat is just ridiculous. Anyways, weigh and measure everything; it is the only way to know what is actually entering your body.

Finally, and illustrating my tech-geeky-ness, I purchased an iPad and iPhone app called MyNetDiary. It is super easy to use (it is designed for Apple devices, after all), contains a food database of over 450,000 items, and it even tells you how many calories you should eat based on your goal and current weights. Finally, it also calls out when the non-primary nutritional elements (I include calories, fat, carbs, protein, and fiber as the primary nutritional elements) are out of whack, such as sodium and calcium (i.e. it not only keeps your weight goals on track, it also points you to healthy choices). The cost of this app is $9.99 (far less than most diet books), and it syncs across both devices and a web site.