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Weight Loss Realisations of the Morbidly Obese

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Guest post by Jason.

I have never liked the phrase “Morbidly Obese”. It sounded so dramatic a diagnosis from a white coated stranger with a body mass index calculator. Obesity comes with a large disclaimer of a future of complications with high cholesterol, blood pressure, diabetes to name a few.

Lifetime of Realisations

I’m a relatively young guy who is just about to enter his thirties. I haven’t yet developed any of the above conditions. Yet my twenties has taken its toll on my young body. Apart from my BMI that is off the richter scale; I’ve developed problems with my back in the form of two prolapsed disks as well as sleep apnoea.

English: The graph shows the correlation betwe...

The graph shows the correlation between body mass index (BMI) and percent body fat (%BF)..

The only cure to my sleep apnoea is CPAP therapy that feels like trying to sleep with a bicycle pump blowing up your nostrils and significant weight loss. The back problems have a similar cure combined with strengthening core mussels and weight loss. I have to loose over 7 stone+ to get me out of the obesity range.

Turning Point

My first child was born this year and it forced me to reflect on my lifestyle choices. It was a bit of a turning point for me. I was concerned that I might not be physically able to look after him in the future if I continued on my current downward heath trajectory. So I decided to tackle the problem head on.

I’ve taken part in many weight loss regimens in the past. I’ve tried Weight Watchers, Atkins and Motivation weight management. With mixed success, loosing a few stone and then putting it all back on over the following years.

About three weeks ago I signed up for Slimming World and I’ve attended two out of three weigh in meetings. The meetings provide a support group, with a weight in and then a chat from the groups coordinator. I lost 5 pound and put one back on but I’m going to stick with the plan as some of the group have already lost 6 stone+.

To be continued ..

Yet Another Health Tracking App?

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There are an ever growing number of apps and devices that can help track your every move, your every bite and how many calories you consume, burn etc.,

Unfortunately a lot of them are a pain in the neck to use. They require a lot of extra work from you in order for them to record everything accurately.

A new app is trying to break that mould.

Argus claims that it will track most of your activities quickly and easily, in many cases without any intervention:

Argus turns your iPhone into a sophisticated health and fitness device as it monitors and manages your activities, food, workouts, sleep, hydration, weight and vitals, helping you make sense of numerous biofeedback data points to reach your health goals and improve overall well-being.

Argus is designed to harness every aspect of mobile computing to monitor your lifestyle without compromising your privacy. Argus is engineered for minimal power consumption and run 24/7 in the background, however continued use of GPS running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life.

Main Features:
– Daily step counter and outdoor activity tracking
– Creates food diary of all your meals with Food Snapping
– Set daily Goals for steps, sleep time and hydration
– Observe trends over time with all variables to track wellness
– Create close friends list to share food photos and other data
– Uses Instant Fitness for your home Workouts
– Uses Sleep Time to monitor your sleep cycles
– Uses Instant Heart Rate to monitor your heart beats
– Built in support of third party wearable devices and health apps

With an intuitive, eye-catching interface, Argus allows you to get a snapshot of your daily activity. Time is organized in honey-comb structure that allow easy aggregation of your data and detailed views. You can tap once on a cell to get more information. You can tap and hold for 2 seconds to get the aggregated views of your inputs.

Have a look at their promotional video where they make it sound like the answer to all my prayers:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/YB4UddXj2sc[/youtube]

The app was released earlier this week and at the moment, while it is promising, doesn’t appear to offer support for that many other health apps apart from the withings scale and a couple of other devices I’m not familiar with.

Having said that the UI is really nice and I’ll be testing some of its other features over the coming days (time permitting)

Argus health app for iphone

Related articles

Barbie Vs Reality

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While a lot of us have very valid reasons to lose weight, others might feel that they should lose weight when it’s really not necessary.

Stereotypes don’t help ..

And one of the ultimate female stereotypes is, of course, Barbie.

So what if you actually took the Barbie doll and applied those proportions to create measurements?

The result is scary:

barbie-reality
Via

 

Maybe someone can do an action man version for us men? 🙂

Fitbit Premium Reports

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If you own a fitbit of any kind you automatically have access to the standard reports. However they also offer a “premium” service with much more detailed reports. The Fitbit premium reports are also available to any free user on a trial basis, so you can see what you’re missing.

Last night, after accepting the Fitbit challenge, I thought I’d setup a trial to see if there was anything in the reports that I could use and I was pleasantly surprised.

For example, the sleep reports tell me immediately that I’m not getting enough sleep (I kind of knew that!):

Fitbit sleep report (sample)

So I need to get about an hour more sleep per night to get myself to the “recommended” level.

There’s also a lot of other metrics that you can dig into such as a much more detailed “activity report” and more extensive comparisons with other users.

The price per year isn’t horrendous at $49.99 – that’s cheaper than a single visit to an Irish GP! (I tend to remind myself of the cost of healthcare). In order to get the most out of my “plan” for 2013 getting a premium account is a bit of a “no brainer”.

Grilling Vegetables

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grilling vegetabes on george foremanI’ve been avoiding eating potatoes when cooking at home for the last while. So instead of doing potatoes of some kind with a steak I’ve either prepared some kind of salad or been grilling vegetables.

Grilling vegetables is pretty simple.

You just slice up the vegetables and put them straight onto the grill – in my case a George Foreman – and let them cook for a few minutes.

The vegetables you can use? Pretty much anything that will grill .. so I usually end up using onion, mushrooms, peppers and anything else that looks like it’ll survive the grill.

This evening, for example, I grilled a few vegetables, microwaved some French beans and ate them with a steak. The end result was incredibly tasty and didn’t use any oil or other extras 🙂 (Well apart from a bit of olive oil I used in the marinade for the steak)

Logging & Tracking What You Eat

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salad with tomatoes, lettuce and other fresh vegetablesSince I started my 2012 attempt to lose weight I’ve made some progress, but I’ve also had a number of bad periods.

One thing, however, that I have learnt is the importance of both portion control and tracking what you eat and drink.

I tried the Tesco Diet for a few months, but found it wasn’t really suited to my either my lifestyle.

In the end I dumped it, but kept the account on their system just for basic tracking. In the end I dumped that as well.

I’m now using a few other tools to track consumption, sleep and exercise / movement.

MyFitnessPal is simply excellent.

They’ve got a very good database of food, including a lot of Irish products. They also have a pretty slick and easy to use mobile app.

One of its handier features being the option to scan barcodes. Why spend ages trying to work out what something is when you can scan the barcode and get the data immediately?

You can also eat “a la carte” and simply input the ingredients you’re using when you’re cooking.

At the moment I’m “suffering” from a certain amount of “data overload”, but I’m also seeing progress.

As a bit of a “geek” being able to track it all using a few services and gadgets is “cool”, but in the end it’s the lifestyle changes that will make me or break me!