January App of the Month: Lose It!

A few weeks ago you may or may not have made some vague promise to yourself about losing weight. Just like last year. Ugh.
Winter may be the worst time to get excited about exercising. I mean, everything is working against us. Less daylight. Crowded gyms. Crappy weather. Delicious holiday food everywhere in sight. Large sweaters to disguise any extra love we may have gained.

Here's something to get excited about, though. The Lose It! app! I've been using it (off and on) for a couple years now, and really like how it gives me a quick way to log my calories in/out for each day.

Don't worry, I didn't just have cream and sugar for breakfast. There was oatmeal in there, too!

However, you'll probably most often find me using this app in line or at the table of a restaurant. You see, it provides nutrition information for different items at many, many chain restaurants!

There are also options to add prepackaged foods you'd buy at the grocery store.

Do you have a favorite recipe that you often use? You can enter in all of the ingredients and how many servings the recipe yields to find out nutrition information for an individual serving!

You can even add your own foods and exercises if you can't find yours in the database.

You even get to pick an icon for it!

My favorite, FAVORITE new feature is the ability to scan items. I don't eat many pre-packaged foods, but when I do it's SO much easier just to scan them!

Don't forget to add your exercise!

So many to choose from! Even things like cleaning the house and *ahem* making love!

LoseIt! also offers a bigger picture with a weekly view and a summary your nutrients for the day and the week. (Note: It's just going off the information it has in the database, this may not be complete.)

I recommend using this app to get a good idea of your net calorie intake each day. I'm not a stickler for getting every last calorie in there with a margin of error of 3%. That's not what's important. Logging your food and exercise it. It makes you responsible for actions that affect your health!

Welcome!

Welcome to My Whole Life Blog!

I started this idea almost a year ago and at that time, I wanted it to focus on health and wellness. While that is still somewhat true, I now want to show that health and wellness is about more than nutrition and physical fitness. I'd like to use this venue to simply share the things I've found helpful in life and pass it along to whomever is interested. I've always been interested in this type of "personal development" (self-help seems a bit dramatic) information so it feels natural to pass on what I've learned. It's most often packaged in a "Oh you just finished college? Here's how to handle your new life in the real world!" wrapper, which I think is great. I don't have all the answers, but it seems silly not to share all these nuggets I've discovered the past several years.

I already have several ideas for posts that I'm very excited about. To give you an idea of what to expect from this blog, here's a list of categories I'm most excited about:

• App of the Month
• Blog of the Month
• Book Reviews
• Financial Management
• Recipes
• Physical Fitness

So I hope you'll join me. I'm always open to suggestions. I hope to one day have guest posts from some of my kick-ass friends. 

And away we go!