Monday, September 17, 2012

Tech Tools + Motivation

Since today is a rest day from the training, I'm going to focus my energy toward sharing some websites I use to keep myself motivated and on track.

Diet Tip of the Day: I love the website My Fitness Pal for food logging!  Basically, you log in each day and log what you have for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks.  It has a large database that includes most food brands, including generic and restaurants, that gives an accurate calorie, sodium, protein, etc. count for each food.  You can even add your own recipes, and it calculates the calories for you!  This website gives you a daily calorie intake for your goals (weight loss, weight gain, maintain weight), as well as goals for sugars, carbs, protein, fat, etc.  You can also log in exercise you do during the day, and My Fitness Pal adjusts the number of calories you can have that day.  This website really opened my eyes to how many calories are in some of my favorite foods, as well as the amount of sugar I eat during the day!  It's a great tool to help you adjust to eating healthy.  It's also available as an app for smart phones, and you can even scan in the UPC codes of the foods you eat to log it for the day.  What a great way to head toward nutritious eating!

Today's Training:  While I'm not doing any training today, the technology tool I use for training is Map My Run.  Again, this website comes with an app for smart phones, which I'm sure adds a whole new dimension to its features.  Sadly, I have a dumb phone, so I can only use the website for planning and logging.  Here's what I know about it:  you can create maps of your most common runs (and send them to your phone for pacing/timing information), then log your workout.  You can include the time it took you to complete the route, and it calculates your pace per mile!  I love using this to plan my runs so that I know the mileage, and I always look forward to logging the workout and checking out my pace.  Great tool for me in my half marathon training!

Faith Find: Call me old-fashioned, but I really don't use technology much when it comes to spiritual disciplines.  I do use a website for my daily devotional (thanks to Forrest White, my youth group director, for sharing that website with me long ago), and I also check out the Living Proof Ministries blog, written by Beth Moore and other, every now and then for their insights and any new books/Bible studies they are doing.  In fact, they held an online Bible study this summer, and I plan on completing that study soon (better late than never!).  There's nothing like pulling out my favorite Bible, reading/underlining verses, and journaling on paper to bring me closer to God.

Back to the training schedule tomorrow!  Hoping and praying for another good week of half marathon training while bringing myself closer to God :)

No comments:

Post a Comment