Now that DH is retired, he has been entering his own foods & exercise on his SP page trackers. He had asked me to make him a SP page quite a while ago, but he didn't want to run it. He wanted ME to do it for him. It is off line, and only there for the food & fitness tracking. I'm glad he's doing it himself now, as it's difficult enough to find the time to run my own page, let alone, his too!

He is full of questions, and that's good....as it's gotten me to figure out something that never really occurred to me before. Here goes:

Do you have your fitness goals set realistically? I had mine set to what I WANTED to do everyday, but not necessarily what I actually accomplished. This is very important. The reason IS....the trackers have figured out how many calories you need to eat according to how many minutes of exercise you do. SO, if you have your fitness goals set unrealistically, you just may have your calories set too high as well. I've been trying to tweak mine to get it just right. For starters, I take one 30 minute dog walk everyday. So, naturally, I have that set into my mileage goals. However, when the fitness trackers asks you what your cardio goals are, DO NOT make the same mistake I did.....your cardio goals are different than your mileage goals. Don't put make the same mistake I did and enter that same number in again, assuming it is for the daily walk. It's not. The cardio goal is OVER AND ABOVE whatever your mileage goal is. So, I lowered my fitness numbers to be realistically of what I am actually doing. In doing this, the tracker has now lowered my calorie counts for the day. Kind of a bummer, but I'd rather be eating the correct amount and not too much.

In the meantime, I hope to improve on my fitness minutes. But, I will not change my numbers until I am actually doing more. For now, I have it set for the mileage on my daily dog walk....Then for cardio, I have added the amount of minutes I do Zumba each week.....and divided that number by 7 days. So, if I do 60 min or 120 min a week of Zumba...I divide that by the 7 days in a week....and say that I will do X amount of cardio minutes a day. (2 hours of Zumba a week= 17 min of cardio a day. 1 hour of Zumba = about 9 min of cardio a day.....this is then the numbers I will use for my daily cardio goals. It all adds up correctly by the end of the week. The calorie counts are now a little bit lower than they were before, but they are now realistic to what I'm actually doing each week. I'd rather be able to actually lose a few extra pounds and/or maintain the same healthy weight.....and NOT gain anymore.) What my goal is now, is to be able to add more cardio into my weekly routine. With each change in the family routine, the exercise times get changed. Sometimes it's a struggle. In other words, I don't have the living room to myself first thing in the morning, like I used to. I'll get this figured out. With the nicer weather, I try to do 2 dog walks, instead of 1. Walking usually isn't enough, tho. The cardio is really important. So is the ST. I need to work that into my routine again, too.

So, it isn't about lowering my expectations. But, it is important to have my actual fitness minute goals recorded correctly (realistically) so SP can give me the actual calorie count that is realistic to what I'm actually doing. If you set your cardio goals to an hour everyday, that needs to be what you're actually doing. Otherwise, you will be eating more calories than you actually should be. See what I mean?