Chantix Diary Update and Fitday.com

FREEDOM!

First of all, can you believe it???  I am on my 17th smoke-free day already!  Aaahhh...the freedom.  No longer am I chained to that terrible addiction.  No more sitting outside on the concrete in the middle of summer when it's 115 degrees outside to have a smoke.  No more planning my day around when and where I can have a cigarette.  No more going out at midnight (or later) to get a pack of smokes because I ran out and can't possibly live until morning to have more on hand.  No more offending anyone with my smokey smell or affecting my kids in even the slightest bit with second hand smoke in the car (oh, but I rolled the windows down so I reasoned it was ok. right.)  Nope!  None of that anymore!  I am FREE!!!!  I am still taking my Chantix and will continue taking it for the full 3 months like they recommend, but at this point I feel that I have really kicked the habit.

I hardly even think about it anymore.  I think about it sometimes only because my brain is trained and put on auto-pilot to think about it at certain times.  Like when I wake up in the morning.  I don't want a cigarette at all.  But my brain is so used to thinking, "It's smoke time!" that the thoughts still cross through sometimes, but then it passes quickly.  I have no urges or needs, so my brain just needs to now get trained to think non-smoking thoughts.

I can breathe!  Oh what a wonderful feeling!  I can walk further distances and for longer periods of time without getting winded.  I smell good all the time!  My husband and kids love that.  The  money I'm saving is being put to good use...buying healthier foods that were typically too expensive for me and my family.  Nothing but good has come out of quitting.  I am so grateful for Chantix!

The other thing is I wanted to give you my review of a very fun website called fitday.com.  Since I have made the first gigantic step to getting healthy...quitting smoking...I am now on my next part of my health journey by losing weight (and a lot of it!) and getting fit.  I'm the type of person that does lots of research on anything I'm interested in.  Finding healthy foods and things like that has been no different.  In my research I came across this website that says, "Free Diet and Weight Loss Journal--Create a Goal, Track Food, Log Activity, & See Progress!  Trusted by over 6 million users."  Count me in as one of those 6 million.

You start by creating a free user account.  Then you set up your profile, current weight, current activity lifestyle, goal weight and goal date.  Each of the tabs on the top of the page has something fun to play around with.  When you click on "Foods" you go to your daily food diary.  You can type in just about anything you can think of and it will bring up choices to choose from like this..... (click for a larger view.)

Then you can click on the magnifying glass to see all that food's details, and you can edit it if you want to start creating your own personal foods list of the things you eat.  I have opted to create custom foods for my stuff so that all the numbers are exactly correct.

You can also add activities.  It works the same as the food search.  You type in something like "shopping" and it will bring up "food shopping with or without a cart" or "non-food shopping standing or walking".  You would be surprised at all the things that you do during the day that can be considered activity.  Even washing dishes for 5 minutes is an activity.  Then you add it to your log and you put in the number of minutes you did the activity and it calculates the calories you burned doing that activity.  Neat, huh?

Fitday.com has a myriad of different graphs and charts showing your progress.  One of my favorites is Calories Eaten v Burned".  Here is my graph.  I feel that I am doing pretty well considering I just started this a few days ago.  Every day I have burned more than I ate, which, of course, equals weight loss.  Yea!  And I only started using the activity log 2 days ago, which is why they are all the same for the first few days.  Also, it's still mid-morning which is why my calories for today are so low still.  You can click for a larger view.

2000 calories or less a day is my beginning goal, so I can see at a glance that I am doing very well.  Just went over a bit one day.  Looking back at my food diary I can see that I had 2 slices of Papa John's pizza that day that put me over my normal numbers.

There are also tabs for your personal daily diary and even a mood tracker to see how your moods are affected by different activities or food choices.

You really should check out fitday.com if you are trying to lose weight.  It really keeps you connected with your diet and food choices as well as really seeing how much activity you are doing and need to be doing to reach the goals.  Of course, they also have premium accounts for even more in depth analysis and use of the tools, but a free account gives you so many tools to work with it's incredible.  Check it out and have some fun with it.