If exercise wasn’t an important part of keeping (or getting) a trim waist line, I’m fairly certain that most people wouldn’t do it. While I do know people who voluntarily head to the gym just because they enjoy it, I know more people who drag themselves there because they know that if they don’t, it won’t be long before life becomes a sweat-pants-wearing cheese fry fest.
Maybe I’m speaking from my own experience, there. Luckily, I have a little more self-control than that, and I don’t mind going to the gym, usually. I fall somewhere between dragging myself there everyday and loving every second of my workouts. There is one day every week or so where I really have to push myself to hit the pavement or make it to an workout class.
If you’re one of the people who works out or knows they should work out to get their weight under control, then there is a good chance that either a fitness monitor, heart rate monitor or pedometer could help you track your progress while cutting down on your waistline. There are plenty of different ways to do it.
Devices That Can Held You Trim Down
Pedometers get you walking more which adds more exercise into your day. Just the idea of having a number to meet is usually enough to get people off the couch for an extra couple hundred steps every day, which turns into an extra thousand steps eventually and then several thousand steps in the long run.
Heart rate monitors, on the other hand, push you into certain ranges so that you are getting the best workout to burn calories rather than the best workout just to get exercise.
Fitness trackers, however, will offer the most comprehensive ability to track not only the exercise you’re doing, but also the impact of what you put in your mouth. Any nutritionist will tell you that if you want to get your eating under control, you need to keep a food journal. That way, you can track your calorie input and see how far over or under your recommended allotment you are.
It’s a Food Journal. Sort Of
Think of your workout band as a fancy food journal with lights and a heart rate monitor. Often, the software that comes with your tracker will also include a way to log what you’re eating for the day and the calories that are included. While some are more accurate than others, the important thing is that logging your food gets you paying attention. If you’re paying attention, you’re making conscious choices and not just putting food in your mouth.
One of the best fitness devices that monitors your food and calorie intake as well as your exercise output is the Body Media Link Armband I reviewed here. Instead of expecting you to input what you ate as well as the suspected calories into the website, you can actually enter what you ate and get a pre-loaded listing of possible entries. By keeping things standardized, there is barely any way of working the numbers to your advantage. You get a real picture of what you’re putting into your body and a real picture of the amount of work you have to do to take it off.
Eating Enough Is As Important As Eating Less
In the cause of Body Media Link, it uses the data that you enter to actually make sure that you’re eating enough calories while checking that you’re not eating too much. A lot of people don’t realize that you have to cut down on your calories while still making sure that you’re getting enough of them. The body effectively goes in to “power save” mode when it isn’t getting enough to fill it up. It stores all of the calories that it can get rather than letting them burn off with exercise.
Step Up Your Game With a Tracker and Drop The Extra Pounds
If you’ve been trying to lose weight for a while without luck, there is always a chance that the problem is your calorie intake. You may be getting too many, too little or the wrong kind all together. If you’re looking for help with that, a device like a fitness tracker not only works as a food journal, but it also keeps you accountable by showing you the actual results of your efforts. More than that, it rewards you throughout for your performance and gives you tangible goals that will help you throughout the process.
You can definitely lose weight without the help of a tracking device. People have been doing it for a long time without any electronics. That being said, if you can get the added benefit of a device that does some of the thinking for you while giving you the information to help you figure out what you’re both doing wrong and doing right, then it probably will help quite a bit.