Of course, its a New Year. And I did nothing to celebrate it. For several reasons.
One: I had my kids. And they stand on ceremony-that-impinges-on-personal-time as much as I do!! Meaning, they didn’t want to stay up just to count backward for 10 seconds.
Two: I had my kids, so no fun adventure. Not even with Sex God as he spent the weekend with his kids & Ex. Lol… sometimes I feel like the “other woman”! (And before you all get worried.. I’ve MET his Ex & we get along just fine 🙂 )
Three: I was EXHAUSTED! Last two weeks of December seem to just kill me. Between Christmas, the kids being off school & it being End Of Year at work I’m usually juggling so much at once that the idea of “finding something to do for New Year’s” is beyond me.
But once the New Year was actually here & I’d met my deadlines & Christmas was OVER!! (I swear people don’t realize that holiday was invented when people had NOTHING to do cuz they were trapped in the grips of WINTER & most likely housebound due to SNOW!! grumble, grumble.) Then I was able to look at my future in 2012. And the first thing I did was download a new app to my iPhone. It was MyFitnessPal
Its a free app… and a basic calorie counter, but since this was the first time in my life I’ve actually counted the calories of what I eat I’m loving the whole thing. I set myself a modest goal of losing 15 pounds.. one pound a week. (Sexy Heather at Coachella here I come!!) And it tells me how many calories I can eat a day to achieve this goal. It allows me to search and add the foods I eat pretty damn easily! Plus it allows me to enter in my exercise which actually ADDS to my allotted calories for the day. SWEET!! Kinda motivates me THAT much more to hit the gym!
But the best part, the thrilling part, is I also put the app on the iPod Touch of my heavy 12-year old son. With a modest goal of 1/2 a pound a week, he’s got a good amount of calories to eat per day. And he’s learning the value of food and the trade offs we sometimes have to make to be able to have what we want.
For Example: We were in Vons & I usually let them buy, with their own money, a donut. Which Evan did. I had him enter the item in his MyFitnessPal. I heard him grunt & say, “Mmmm, guess I’m going to have to do some exercises today.” (300 calories for a handful of yummy goodness that isn’t going to do anything more but make you want another donut!)
But upon hearing his comment….. well, lets just say if I wasn’t driving a car at the time, I would have been dancing. The most challenging part of getting an overweight kid to slim down is motivating them and getting them to understand that no exercise = less food. Cuz realistically, its not always the food they eat or the portions (although those are often factors) its the fact that they are so sedentary. My other two move ALL the time! And they don’t have the snacking desires that me and my middle son do. So they stay amazingly skinny!
But Evan eats pretty healthy. Lots of fruit, yogurt, raw veggies when I pull them out. He just sometimes eats a lot of them. And the MyFitnessPal lets him realize that if he eats just 1 sausage instead of 2 sausages he might be able to fit in a snack later in the day. So its teaching him portion control…. something that he’ll NEED for the rest of his life, if he ends up a chunky adult!
Yesterday Evan and I calculated what we ate at the end of dinner to see if we could have my homemade chocolate chip cookies for desert….
“Do I get a cookie, Mom?” he asked.
“We did so well, we both get… TWO!”
After the high fives & dancing (burning calories.. YES!) I realized this app was teaching him the most important lesson of all…
EARN your reward through EFFORT.
I would have paid money if I’d known he’d be learning THAT! 🙂