Simpleweight Food is back up and running.  Thanks again for your patience.

We’re in the process of rolling out some new features of the next couple of weeks.  So, we’ll do our best to minimize any downtime.  I’ll write a post with some details coming soon.

Thanks.

Hey Everyone,

We started upgrading some internal pieces of Simpleweight last night in anticipation of next update coming this month, May.

As a consequence, Simpleweight Food is down for the time being.

We will have it back up later today.  We apologize for the inconvenience.  Everything else should be working normally.

Thanks for your patience.  If there is something we can do to help you with your weight loss management, please let us know.

I’m going to make this personal - I just wanted to warn you up front.

Have you ever noticed that when you make a commitment to someone important to you, that you do everything you can to hold yourself to that commitment. Be it your child, spouse, sibling, parents or just a good friend; when that commitment is made you do your best to keep it. You know that if you miss your commitment that you just let someone down who is important to you. Have you ever asked why that doesn’t work for yourself?

Think about it for a second. How many times have you made a commitment to be more healthy? And how many times did you let yourself down? Aren’t you important to yourself? Shouldn’t you worry about how you feel when you don’t meet your own commitment?

Well, I’ve done it recently, and I think I know why. It’s easy not to hold yourself to something you haven’t openly stated. It’s even easy when you mention it in passing. Essentially we’re really not trying to make that commitment because we know it’s easier just not to do.

That ends today for me. Today I’m making a commitment to eating healthy for the next 30 days. In addition I’m going to maintain at least 3 workouts a week. I’m stating it here so that everyone can hold me accountable to my commitment to myself - including me!

Now you maybe saying - that’s great Ryan, but that’s not so hard to do. I agree, it really shouldn’t be, and to ensure I don’t fall short here is the list of items I won’t let get in my way:

• Managing a critical project work with ever ending impending deadlines
• Two extremely energetic young sons ready to wrestle me to the ground first foot through the door
• The fact child #3 is on it’s way
• My wife is on bedrest for preterm labor, and I’m responsible for cooking, cleaning, getting the kids up, and putting them down for bed
• My commitment to continuing development of simpleweight and all of you using our system! Our next release features a new look and feel, along with the beginnings of our social features

Now that’s just a few, I’m sure I could find more if I were looking. And by making this declaration, I’m not saying I’m going to ignore any of those other commitments - in fact I’m going to keep all those too. All I’m saying is that I’m making my health a priority again now too.

My current weight right now: 197.5 lb.

I’ll be posting updates between now and May 22nd, so please check back for my progress. But better yet - why not make your health your commitment too? Join me in making the commitment, who’s with me?

Photo Credit: Avocado via Flickr, by: miniteca

An excellent tip for overcoming your emotional weight gain binges:

Create a list of 50 things you can do instead of eating when you’re feeling in need of a boost.
Source: Think Slim: http://smallchange.typepad.com/thinkslim/2008/04/emotional-eatin.html

Often times,

• When we’re down, we reach for food.
• When we’re excited, we reach for food.
• When we want to celebrate, we reach for food.
• When we want to meet friends, let’s meet for dinner (we reach for food).
• When we’re sad, we reach for ice cream (food).

Here’s my suggestion:

Do not reach for food.

My friends who do not have weight problems or who are constantly in shape, they don’t do this. They don’t reach for food. They have built up mechanisms to curb their emotional eating.

Sometimes these weight management oriented friends:

1. Exercise or reach for the runners’ high
2. Have a big social open support network of people to call when the doldrums hit
3. Hike or camp
4. Garden
5. Clean the house
6. Rearrange the furniture
7. Heck, some even design/build furniture
8. Play a musical instrument
9. Write in a journal
10. Play a game

What’s the common thread among these slim friends?

They do anything and everything to try to involve physical movement with activities that are away from food.

In other words, my friends who have no problems with weight Do not reach for food.

I suggest we all could do like Think Slim Suggests: Make a list of 50 things we can do instead of eating when we feel we need a boost.

What do you do to overcome your emotional roller coaster?

Ways to stay motivated during weight loss.

On rainy days, like today in Chicago-land area, motivation can be fleeting. It seems to be common around the internet.  I’ve seen two or three posts today on how to fight doldrums, stay motivated, and be productive.

I ran across this rather funny take on motivation titled:  Decrease your Likelihood of Being Hit By a Meteor.

Here’s the top 3 funniest motivations for losing weight that I saw:

Reason #4: To Decrease your Likelihood of Being Hit By a Meteor
Reason #5: To Decrease Your Likelihood Of Being Eaten By Cannibals
Reason #8: Get Drunk Quicker

The post is funny, but a poignant reminder we have to constantly focus on our own motivation for managing our weight.

Some people have a very life or death reasons for weight gain or weight loss, cancer, heart issues, diabetes, bone structure, and many more.  The Doctor told them, you need to eat right and get in better shape or you will die. In that scenario, it’s a pretty compelling reason to change your habits. Other people don’t have that motivation, they might not see it that way, and only want to use fitness as a way to get more money, power, better looking, etc.

Regardless, whatever the motivation, The motivation has to be internalized. If the motivation is outward pressure from your boyfriend, husband, girlfriend, wife, mom, dad, children, dog, chicken, slug, or favorite trilobite, you will likely return to your normal habits. Repeat this to yourself: What is my motivation for weight loss? I have to find my own motivation.

NEXT ACTION:

Take 5 minutes to Breath, Close your Eyes, and Think: `What are my 10 motivational reasons for physical fitness?`. Write them down and revisit those motivating reasons everyday! Make sure your reasons are sustainable for a lifetime!

Tell me: What motivates you to maintain a healthy lifestyle?

Side note:

Ryan and I are in the middle of a simpelweight.com redesign and refresh. As I always ask, What is the number one thing simpleweight.com can do to help you with you achieve your physical fitness goals?

another side note: 3 other interesting articles.

The No-Diet Diet from Real Simple.

How zenhabits.net Leo is going to get in shape

Join Simple Weight for easy to use physical fitness tools.

Simple weight updates were completed March 21 evening. Ryan did a great job adding some new features for our free public users.

What’s New with Simple Weight Loss?

• Exercise Calorie Calculators
  The General public can now calculate their calorie burn using our nifty activity calorie calculators.
• New, improved, and quicker Charts and Reports
  We’ve replaced some of our flash charts with simple image charts. The site loads much faster.
• Charts and Reports have the beginnings of Social Features: One can now easily paste their favorite chart or report into their own blog, facebook page, myspace, etc… Here’s my weight loss for the year 2008:
  Of course, this chart demonstrates that one needs to focus on the trend and not the day to day fluctuations.
• Minor feature and bug fixes for various requests by users. For example, you can now save custom foods with your own serving size without having to click or save twice.

What’s Next?

Well, we’re working on a site design refresh to liven up the site and make it more attractive. We plan to re-organize the public pages to better explain our exceptional simpleweight offerings. We’ve been promising more social features.

Why do we add and make changes?

We’re always trying to make simpleweight easier to use, and we’re trying to make it easy to follow weight loss’s aggregate best practices:

• Weigh yourself on a regular schedule. (I suggest every day, or once a week.). Make sure you weigh yourself the same time with relatively the same clothes
• Track your energy expenditures and how much exercise you can do.
• Track how much you eat, when you eat, how you eat, and why you eat
• Make your weight loss social!

We’ve got tools simplifying the top three in that list above, and Social Features are coming. It will just make it easier if you just start using Simpleweight now.

What can we do to make Simpleweight so simple you will actually use it

Consider this a heads up that over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be doing some minor updates and cosmetic changes.  We’ve got a major update to public functionality by adding a public exercise calculator functionality.  We’re also planning on adding the first parts of our Simpleweight Club Features.  The ability to post your simpleweight charts on your own blog, facebook, myspace page just  by copying and pasting some simple code.

we’re working on a refreshed design, some more club items, and a few other features that we’re still ironing out.

If you’ve got ideas on how we should improve simpleweight, let us know.

Stay tuned…

I have been Robert Scoble like in my rabid reading of blogs. While doing so one day, I ran across stronglifts.com. I subscribed a while back, but I never really read much of the content. It was too body-builder-ish for me. But a recent post caught my attention: How Will Smith Became Successful and How You Could Too. Take a look. There is a great video where Will Smith says the two keys to life are Running & Reading.

Motivated and Inspired. I needed to do some reading. I thought to myself. What can I get my hands on to read? I have said in the past, “You are What You Eat, Read, and Do.” So, if you read junky, rumor-monger tabloids. then, you become a rumor-monger yourself. If you read economics books, you will become an economist.

I want to improve my physical fitness. So, I need to read Fitness books. Since, I subscribed to stronglifts.com rss feed, I noticed a link for a free StrongLifts 5×5 eBook, and I decided to check it out.

Wow, There are some gems in that book, and I can’t believe it’s free.

Bad workouts are better than no workouts. They train you mentally & reinforce the exercise habit. Don’t rationalize.

You are what you repeatedly do. Make a plan & stick to it. No matter what.

See, what I mean about gems.

I don’t agree with everything the eBook suggests, but I can not knock it because I have not tried the 5×5 program.

At a glance, The program suggests working out 3 times a week 30 minutes each time. During your workout you will perform:

• Squats
• Overhead Press
• Bench Press
• Deadlift
• Barbell Row
• Pull-ups & Chin-ups (optional)
• Dips (optional)

Here’s why I will not do it. The author strongly recommends squats. To do squats effectively one needs the appropriate gym equipment and fairly flexible hips and ankles. Guess what, that strikes me out on two accounts. I do not have the appropriate gym equipment and my hips and ankles are stiffer than a rusty break-dancing Wizard of Oz Tin Man trying to do a Mr. Robot move.

Of course, it does not help that StrongLifts does not mention Simpleweight as the service for tracking your eating, exercising, and biometrics. (strike 3 and your out) I’ll give him a pass since Simpleweight is still a rather new service.

The other thing I love about the ebook are the inspirational quotes from Napoleon Hill. Napoleon Hill is excellent. I love his books. So, Of course, I have to follow with the closing strong lifts Napoleon Hill quote.

“You can do it if you believe you can.”

If I believe I can follow the weight lifting program prescribed, then I can do it. There I go again: Thinking and Losing Weight.

So, Do I recommend the book?

Yes, I recommend the book. One can not beat the Price (free), and it’s a good quick read.

Do I recommend the workout?

I recommend the workout plan for those with the appropriate equipment and reasonable hip & ankle flexibility. The exercises are great and the program looks straight forward.

However for those without access to the appropriate equipment, I think the are other methods to achieve the same benefits using more of a dumb-bell workout. I’ll talk about those in the future.

Last Night, we pushed out some new simpleweight upgrades. Again, most of the features are behind the scenes.

We did have a couple of recent feature request. Specifically, one of our users asked to sort favorites. Consider it done.

All you have to do is drag and drop your favorite foods in the order you want. They will save automatically.

What does the work behind the scenes mean for our users? It means, we will be able to continue implementing features on a quicker basis with easier testing.

We have noticed simpleweight is a little slower since the recent upgrades. It’s due to our popularity increasing. We’ve had a lot of viewers and page hits recently. We’re working on improving performance. We appreciate your patience.

Thank you again. If you like what you see, please click on advertisement or two to help sponsor us or of course. we ask you to recommend your friends, and we’ll pay you for your referral just Refer your friends to Simpleweight.

As always, What is the one thing we need to do to simpleweight to help you join our weight loss club?

After writing my Flat Belly Diet Eat MUFA for Weight Loss post, I continued to do more research. Some people asked me,

How do I add MUFA (mono unsaturated fat) at every meal?

Basically, try to add: Avocado, Canola oil, Olive Oil, Nuts like almonds, cashews, pecans, and peanuts, Olives, Peanut butter and peanut oil, or Sesame seeds to your diet.

One of the best ways is to try to mix and optimize those ideas. For example: Traditional pesto is made from pine nuts, olive oil, basil, parmesan cheese. What a tasty way to get MUFA.

Here are some more specific ideas for each meal:

MUFA Breakfast Ideas for weight loss

• Add Avocado in omelet
• Spread Peanut butter on toast, bagels, english muffins, or apples
• Sprinkle Almonds (nuts) on top of pancakes, waffles, and even french toast
• Mix nut-based granola in your yogurt
• Blend Flax Seed Oil with your favorite fruit smoothie
• Add Sunflower seeds, Walnuts, or Pecans to your cereal or oatmeal

MUFA Lunch & MUFA Dinner Ideas for weight loss

• Toss sliced avocado, chopped olives, or sliced nuts in your green leaf salad
• Pour Oil Based Dressings on top of your salad specifically Olive Oil, Sun Flower, or Peanut Oil
• Add avocado to a Mexican chicken or black bean soup
• Instead of croûtons, add nuts and seeds to your or soup or salad
• Add nuts to stir fry dishes
• Ask for Olives in your Enchiladas or other Mexican Food.
• Dribble Pesto sauce over a small bed of noodles
• Add a dollop of pesto to dishes such as tomato soup or baked potato
• Stir olives into your red pasta sauce
• Sprinkle nuts on cream-based soups like tomato-basil, butternut squash soup, etc.
• Add Avocado to your deli sandwich (Jimmy John’s is great for this)
• Top your Chicken Sandwich, Turkey Burger, or Small Hamburger with Guacamole

MUFA Snack Ideas for weight loss

• Eat Raw Nut based Trail Mix.
• Spread Olive tapenade on a cracker or crostini
• Spread Avocado and cheese on a cracker
• Dip apples or celery in Peanut or almond butter
• Have an Olive Loaf Bread slice with olive oil

Remember, the key here is you need to keep your quantity of calories down for maximum benefit.

As I detailed in my MUFA weight loss article, Nuts, Avocados, and Oils are all high calories foods. Yet, they are very filling so you need less food at your meal. Try to strive for 400 calorie meals with a vegetable and protein rich diet.

Now that you know my MUFA ideas, What’s your favorite MUFA meal idea?

Photo Credit: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner via Flickr, by: Jeff Kubina