Basic Pursuits

Last week I wrote a post on a study that essentially said that most people are fine if they simply drink when they are thirsty. You don't need to force yourself to drink some arbitrary amount, like a gallon a day.

If you are a Twitter user or thinking of becoming one, here's yet another way to count calories.

Tweetwhatyoueat is a service that keeps track of your daily intake of food and totals the calories. Twitter members "friend" the tweetwhatyoueat service and message the items that that they eat. The service keeps calculates the calories and keeps a running total.

You can do this from a computer or a cell phone. Don't we live in marvelous times?

Discovery Health, the TV channel, produced a pretty good special called The Truth About Food. One segment strove to make the point that people eat too much because they grossly misjudge the size of the portion that they are consuming.

Zen Habits offers 14 "Stress-Free Ways to Kick Weight Loss in the Butt."

The article has a lot of great tips about losing weight, like focus on a gradual loss and focus on nutrition. Indeed, if you get the nutrition right, the weight loss will pretty much take care of itself.

Which brings me to Way #8 You gotta log.

Here is another online calorie counter that outputs nutrition data. I still prefer the downloadable, free opensouce Chron-O-Meter, but A Calorie Counter has some great features. I'm especially impressed with the active blog where the author does some much appreciated research on fast food items.

A Calorie Counter

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The World Cancer Research Fund recently released a report telling many of us what we already know: that lifestyle is a huge determiner for cancer risk. Specifically, about one third of cancers are due smoking. Smoking 20 cigarettes a day increases your risk of lung cancer20-fold). Another third come from poor eating habits and lack of exercise. The last third includes: "genetic predisposition, ultraviolet sunlight, pollutants such as
pesticides, and other factors including cosmic radiation and a
naturally occurring radioactive gas called radon."

Cron-O-Meter
I've tried online calorie counting and find it a bit cumbersome in that it depends on the computer and the internet connection. Cron-O-Meter runs like a marathoner on most systems and is many times faster than any online solution that I've tried. It's very personalizable, yet enables you to import foods and recipes from other users. Disadvantage: it records your eating on one computer.

Gyminee

I love the Internet. At a party at the beginning of the summer, a young friend said to me that the Internet is like magic. Just log on and ask a question and more than likely you'll get an answer. I'm always searching for new resources for health information. Like magic I find them often. Here are a few sites that may be useful to you.

Many people rightly see constantly weighing oneself as a measure of health progress as counter-productive.

Researchers from the Dallas Heart Study have supplied us with a much more practical and objective metric to work with.