First Time Mom and Losing It

SparkPeople is an awesome healthy living website with tools and a rich community that helps you stay motivated to lose weight. They also have a Diet & Food Tracker App that you can use when you are away from your computer.

Though you can load the website from your Smartphone and Tablet, the App offers a more convenient way to track you daily food, exercise and goals.

These are the separate sections of the App:

Today: Gives you a clear view of what is going on today. You can easily see how many calories you have eaten and how many you have left. On the bottom of that you can see how many fitness minutes you have completed and how many calories you have burned. The best part of the Today section is that with just the click of the buttons you can quickly track your food and fitness.


Food: Allows you to easily track you food by scanning the bar codes of any food you have eaten or by doing a search. You then chose the serving size you ate and when you ate it. You get a nice clear picture of what you have eaten and how many calories you have left to eat.


Exercise: You can easily track all of your daily activities. It is as easy as doing a search, picking the activity and the duration.

Points: A great thing about SparkPeople is the point system they use to help motivate you. You get SparkPoints for doing anything like tracking your food or reading an article.


More: Allows you to track other things like your water intake or weight. You can also see reports on how you are doing.


Using this app helps to motivate me and keep me on track. I do everything on my smartphone so having this app makes it easy for me to track my food, exercise and water intake daily. The app cost $3.99 and there is one for Apple and Android.

Are there any diet/fitness apps that you like?

When my daughter first started on solids I scoured Pinterest to find baby food recipes. There was one site that I kept going back to, Nurture Baby. It is an awesome site with healthy recipes for babies up to toddlers. One of my daughter's favorite recipes from this site is the Creamy Chicken Florentine.

The great thing about the site is the recipes have enough servings that you can make ahead and freeze for later. I would always have several completed recipes on hand in my freezer. If I was planning on eating out or something she couldn't eat, I had a healthy alternative in the freezer. I also used to pop a couple of the servings in a freezer bag and leave them in my mom's house so that my daughter could have a nutritious meal without my mom having to do any work.

To make these freezer ready:

1. Click on the link and follow the yummy and easy recipe for the Creamy Chicken Florentine. I halved the recipe and it made 6 toddler sized servings.
2. Completely cool the Creamy Chicken Florentine that you just made.
3. Take silicone cupcake baking cups (I bought mine at Michael's) and fill to the top. For babies you can use ice cube trays. 
   
4. Place full cupcake baking cups on top of a cookie sheet. Place in freezer and freeze for about one hour. 
5. When fully frozen pop out of the silicone baking cups and place into a freezer storage bag. 
   
6. Label the freezer bag with name and date. 

Food tracking is one the essential things to do when dieting. It shows you calories in and if you track exercise you can see calories out. If your calories out is higher than your calories in you will definitely lose weight. It's that simple!

A lot people don't like to track food because it can be very tedious. Dieters tend to guess how much they are eating. Without a true count you can easily go over your calorie intake by the hundreds. Do this everyday and you will probably not lose any weight, or worse, gain weight!

These are 3 ways that you can track food:

1. The fastest and easiest for me is the bar code scanner on a smartphone. There are apps that allow you to scan bar codes on food packages and track what you eat. I have used the SparkPeople App and the FitnessPal app. Though I like the FitnessPal app slightly better, I use the Sparkpeople App because my numbers are updated automatically into my SparkPeople account. SparkPeople is $3.99 and FitnessPal is free.

2. Using a site like SparkPeople. You just go to the food tracking section of your account and search for what you ate and a whole list of similar items pop up. You pick the ones you ate, pick the serving size and add it to your daily food log. The site then calculates and adds everything together. At the end of the day you see your total calorie intake.

3. Notebook and pen. Get a notebook and dedicate it to be your food tracker. You can just write down what you ate for the day and then go to a site like calorie count and see how many calories is each piece of food you ate. At the end of the day just add up what you ate.

If you have a smartphone I highly recommend number 1. It is a fast and easy way to track your food for the day. If you don't have a smartphone, using a site like SparkPeople can also easily work to track your food. If you track your food for just one week, you will see what you are eating and can adjust your calories in vs calories out to lose some weight. You may also discover that you are eating too little and need to adjust that too.