By Travis Parry
This month is National Nutrition Month and with it people all over the country are spending more time evaluating their own eating habits and making goals to eat better.
It is more likely that your goals for better Health will be accomplished by Tracking your progress. Tracking will help you to discover what it is you are currently doing and help you decide where to improve. Having a good Tracking Tool and being disciplined enough to actually Track what you are doing will help tremendously in actualizing your Health and Fitness goal.
Competitive Athletes all have some sort of Tracking Sheet or Program that they follow religiously in order to make sure they are eating the right things, doing the correct amount of exercises. They use the Tracking Tool to help them make course corrections to reach their goals.
Not all of us are Olympic Athletes, but we each can benefit from using a Tracking Tool. A good Tracking Tool can be as simply as a paper notebook and as sophisticated as the following 3 online programs.
American Heart Association mystartonline.org
Map My Run www.mapmyrun.com
Vitality for Life www.vfl.com.
AHA’s tool allows you to track food intake and exercise. Its main focus is to track your calories eaten and calories burned walking. The tracking of food is somewhat cumbersome as it sends you to another site to look up the nutritional information. This is a good starter tool and much better than paper.
Map My Run has a decent application that is mainly focused on the GPS location of your outdoor exercise routine, which is amazing. It has a tracking tool but unlike the AHA tool does not give you any help in finding out how many calories you ate. It has an iphone app and a way to compete with your friends online and is highly interactive.
Vitality for Life is the best choice out of the three above for overall tracking and improvement. It tracks food intake and exercise very simply. It has a smart feature that figures out the calories and nutritional information from the food you enter and gives a personal profile update. It also has the option to financially reward you for tracking your food and exercise each day which is probably the most important.
In reality the tool that you actually use will be the most effective. Try each of them out and begin using something to Track your progress towards your Health goals, so that you can better Live Life on Purpose.
