Healthy Living in Connecticut Blog

Mat, the Fitness Director at the Northwest CT YMCA, posted his first superfood for the Fitness Commitment Challenge and it's blueberries.

This week isn't much of a challenge for me as I eat blueberries practically everyday. When looking at a list of super foods, it's probably hard to find one that I don't eat.

During the first week of the challenge, things have been going along nicely. My weight is the same, which is what I want, but my body fat percentage is going down! I'm almost in the teens when the trainer used the calipers on my body fat! So I'm slowly getting it down but it's a long process.

I also was able to finally check on my activity during the past week. The FitKik Pebble we use keeps track of all activity, but you can't really monitor the activity live. Once last week's info was uploaded at the YMCA kiosk, I saw that I met my personal goals… I still get 10,000 steps a day! This tells me that I'm more than active enough. I hope my other team mates did well too!

I've followed my diet plan 2 other times before in my life. Both times I have lost about 8-10 pounds in the first week of the diet during the jumpstart period.  This go around I decided to try something different by throwing in light cardio exercise.

Things are turning out different.  

The scale is still somewhat static and has not changed much since the start.  So far I am only down about 3 pounds as of the begining of day 5.  Now this could be good or bad.  I am unsure what to make of it at this point.  One fact is I have pounds of food sitting in my system that have not been "evacuated" yet so in another day my weight may shift down again. But on another side, is my daily exercising the reason I am not losing as I did before.  Is the exercise somehow interrupting the fat burning process? I guess a little more time will tell.

Things are moving along! Day 3 of the 8 day jumpstart period completed!

What better way to prove my progress than to take photos of the scale!  It is easy to log and post my weights... but how would you know truth from fiction? I missed photos of the first two days but from here on out I will have photos of the scale every day.  Let's hope it keeps going down! With the type of scale I have I cannot cheat it... it has balance indicators that will not log your weight if it detects that the person is shifting their weight on the scale and little arrows show up on the display to let you know you are cheating!  I love it. 

I've written about the dangers of childhood obesity before. It's nice to see that the State of Connecticut wants to do something about this problem. I thought I would post their press release as it is such an important cause. Three schools will be awarded $100,000 for a state of the art gym. What better way to help kids get into shape?

As many of you know, so many kids are making the wrong food choices and not getting enough exercise. We need to do something to encourage exercise. We also need to educate both kids and adults about proper nutrition. Too many parents take their kids to McDonald's instead of cooking at home.