Ryan Hinchcliff
Professor Kristen Dicianna
DWHP 3300
11 February 2016
My Fitness Pal Midterm Paper

Food Diary After completing four weeks worth of my fitness pal diary entries, I have come to realize that I am not the healthiest eater in the world. My calories were all over the place and sodium was off the charts! I am not a super active person, but I do always fill my day with errands, work and school. So trying to slow down and actually track what I was eating and how little or how much was pretty rough. I started my journey with absolutely no care in the world, basically my normal routine. Eating whatever I wanted, when I wanted and for however long I wanted. I ate a lot of bagels and fast food. None of which was healthy, but down the hatch it went. But then the my fitness thing kept telling me that I wasn’t eating enough! I usually would only get 2 meals in a day, because of my overnight shifts at the hospital. At the end of week one I had accumulated 10,870. My average intake for the week was 1,552 of my allotted calories of 1700. So I was under. This is astounding as I feel like I eat a lot! My second week I was determined to eat a bit more meals, if I could fit them in. I got a all three meals for every day, so I felt that I was making a bit of progress. I ended the week with a total calorie intake of 12,243 though. That was more than the week before with 3 meals a day. It gave me an average of 1749 for the week which was good. This put me in a position to where I hoped the exercise would even me out. I felt like a fatty eating that much. On the third week, I kept eating the 3 meals a day but focused on my calories burned a bit more. I was drinking water almost exclusively, but still eating a lot of junk food. It tastes so good! My total calories went down but my sodium intake was huge. I ate a lot of meaty items. I honestly did not track this week as good as I should have so I won’t post the numbers.

Exercise Diary I struggled with the exercise portion of this assignment as I hate to work out! Being in the army I am forced to work out and hate every second of it. I have never had a problem with my weight and thus never got “hooked” to the gym like other people do. All that aside, I did my part for this class. For the first week, as above, I ate what I wanted but started the workout “routine” of walking my dog….a lot. I enjoy walking him and enjoy the breeze, but most important walking does not make me feel like I’m going to die like running does. So I walked him for about an hour each day to burn off any extra calories I could. I also started doing some workouts with my wife. She got into the 21-day-fix stuff and has been seeing results so I joined in on a few sessions. Overall it was a successful week for me personally as that was more activity than I had done in a while. On week two, I had to fly out of town so I was running through airports and hustling around my hometown, which wore me out at the end of the day. I was away from my dog, so I just did some walks with my mom to get some exercise in. When I returned home I tried some yoga with my wife and the straight back to walking the dog. The yoga was actually refreshing and I continue to do with her. All the stretches make me feel pretty loose afterwards. On week three, I got kind of lazy and skipped a few days. I did however continue to walk the dog and I tried Pilates with my wife. That stuff is no joke. I was super soar the next day, but I felt good about doing the workout. Later in the week the weather was nice, so we went and played tennis for an hour. It was a blast. After logging both exercises into my fitness, I was shocked to find out that the tennis was 4 times as better at burning calories than the Pilates was. If the weather would only cooperate I would play every day!

My Results After completing the 3.5 weeks of fitness and food tracking I feel better and worse about myself. Honestly I think it was all the videos that we watched in the class that made me feel gross about what I eat. The workouts were going against the grain of my everyday routines, but they weren’t bad. I will continue to do the moderate exercises and walk my dog daily. Tracking my food was a task for me and didn’t really seem to matter regardless of what I tried to change or adjust. So I probably will not continue to track calories and watch my horrible sodium levels rise through the roof. It was interesting, but I feel like as long as I continue to eat as I have and maintain the weight in the range that I want, that I don’t need to count every calorie like they were bad marks. Growing up both of my parents were both pretty big and overweight and I never wanted to be like that. Since then, my dad had gastric bypass and kept the weight off. My mom, got bit by the workout bug and shed all the weight and is now very healthy and managing a running store. I’m sure she will always be this way.
As I grew up I was a bean pole. I could never gain weight, but I stayed very active in sports so I think that helped me stay pretty thin. I developed the bad eating habits I have today from when I first went out on my own. Two meals a day was the norm back then and still is, due to money and time. When I joined the army I was a tiny thing, barely breaking 140lbs. After a few years of PT and eating as much as I wanted, I am up to a healthy 170lbs. I now float from 170-175lbs and am content with that.
I feel that I did ok, considering that I work in the middle of the night, every night. It’s hard to work out when everyone else is sleeping or when it is freezing outside. I also got stuck in a blizzard during all of this. Again, all things considered, I am patting myself on the back. If I had to do this all again, I would probably eat a lot more fruit and do the 21day fix with my wife religiously just to see what it would do to my weight and health. Overall I enjoyed the experiment.