My Fitness Pal

Can we talk about how perfect this picture is? I love everything about it. There's even salami on the snack plate and cracker crumbs in the bed. This artist gets me.

Related:

Realistically, it's probably only about an extra 5 pounds that's making all of my clothes uncomfortably tight. But it feels like so much more. Maybe because it's summer and it's hot and extra weight gets extra sweaty.

Since I've been consciously trying to make my clothes more comfortable, AND trying to lower my cholesterol for a few weeks now with no results, I decided to download an app that my coworker was talking about. My Fitness Pal.

First impressions:

User friendly. You basically enter all your info and it calculates how many calories you should be consuming to reach your goal. Then you enter what you eat, how much water you drink, and how much you exercise. It helps you keep track of things throughout the day and warns you when you're getting too close to a limit.

Cool features:

You enter what you eat several different ways:

• You can do a search to see if it pulls up. For example, strawberries. 
• You can scan the barcode on the package of what you're eating and it automatically uploads the nutrition info.
• There is a recipe tab where you can enter ingredients and calculate the nutritional information. It's a bit time consuming, but necessary since I cook a lot of my own meals.

It breaks your meals down into calories, but the cool part is it also tells you if you exceed daily recommended amounts of fat, sugars, etc. For instance, today I went WAY over on cholesterol and fats, and didn't get enough of calcium or iron. I was so surprised once I saw it broken down. This is important stuff! I figured if I ate enough vegetables I'd be healthy. Wrong.

I'm pretty impressed. With help from this app, now I can identify where I need to make some changes, and also be more aware of what I'm putting into my body. I've already learned a few things.

See? I never knew how many calories were in wine. Which is why I measured mine tonight. FYI 1/2 c. of this particular Malbec is 80 calories. How do I know? I scanned the barcode on the bottle. 
Cheers!