Greetings and Salutations

[Lyridia]

     Where to start....  Well, I'm Lyr, 30 years old, married, and have three kids.  I have always been out of shape and have tried again and again to get motivated to no avail.   I downloaded and read the, "15 Mistakes Newbies Make When Trying to Get Healthy", last night.  Actually I spent most of the night reading on this site.  I have to admit most if not all of those have applied to me at one point or another in my life.  It was like a slap to the face seeing it laid out like that.

 

    I have never tried to reach out to a forums community for support or motivation before, I am hoping to make friends here and find the support I lack here at home.  So, my first step is to track everything.  What I eat, what I drink, what I do... Everything for a week.  Got to know where I'm at before I can figure out what to change.  While doing that I'm starting to figure out what my exercise routine should look like.  I am a stay at home mom, have not worked in 3 years, was put on bed rest when my youngest child was born, she will be 3 in December.  To top it all off, I broke my ankle and 5th metatarsal in March.  It is fully healed now, but there is still joint pain and muscle loss there.  I know that is not an excuse, I'm not trying to make excuses.  Just with all that in mind, I want to find a workout that will make me stronger, without pain, and without equipment.

 

    Hmm... I wonder if there is a place where I can start a thread on here where I can make regular updates and ask any and all questions, just one thread, I don't want to clutter the forums up.  That's something I'll look into next time I'm on the computer.  For now I have to go and cook dinner.

 

     Looking forward to meeting you and talking to you and getting to know you.

 

 

~Lyr~

[JamesAndrew]

Hi Lyridia. Tracking is such a great first step towards taking control of your diet and exercise. There's a free app for ios and android called MyFitnessPal that is great for this. I like it because it has an almost comprehensive database of nutrition info for anything you can buy at a supermarket or health food store. You can even take a photo of the bar code on a packaged product and it gets this right surprisingly often. What I love about using this app to track my eating (it tracks exercise too but I have not use that feature) is that it records nutrition information such as protein carbohydrate and fat content of everything you eat. so at the end of the day,you can see a pie graph which shows your ratio of protein to carbohydrates to fats for the day. This can be a real eye opener. Recently I started trying for a daily goal of 40% protein/30% carbs/40% fat and I thought I was pretty close, but when I tracked my eating on the first day I saw that I was at 15% protein/25% carbs/60% fat! This enabled me to make some serious changes to get in line with my goals.

[Lyridia]

Thanks for the App recommendation I'll definitely check it out.  Currently I'm using a combination of several tracking methods.  Trying to find the one that works best for me.

[LittleMissSunshine]

Welcome! I lookforward to following you as you work towards your goals

 

One tip on MyFitnessPal - the food side is great! The exercise side, not so much. I tracked there for a while and it was consistently over-reporting my calorie burn, as compared to a heart-rate monitor I wore for a while. Really great tool for getting a handle on what you're eating, though - it's a real eye-opener to see it all laid out like that!

[Lyridia]

I have been looking into getting a Fitbit Flex, from all the reviews I have seen it is the best one of it's kind on the market.  If it works as well as they say it does, it will be less guesswork on how much I have worked out for the day.  Will allow me to put more focus on other things.  If I get it, I will post results on my daily battle log.