Welcome


Thoughts on fitness, health, good nutrition ... and running.


Welcome to Bald Man Running, a blog launched by Frank Murphy on January 1, 2015.

In March, 2013 I was selected as a contestant for the sixth season of Fort Wayne's Smallest Winner. Through this amazing program, I learned about good nutrition, sound exercise and accountability. By October, I would lose over 88 pounds (almost 37% of my original weight)! One of the many things I acquired through FWSW was a love for running. You can retrace my weight loss journey and discover how I became a runner by reading those entries labeled "fwsw" ...

Note: Many of the blog entries on this website predate 1/1/2015. Prior to launching BMR, I had written articles for various projects, and I have imported many of them into this blog (labeled "retro").

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

myfitnesspal

A few days ago I said that if you choose to take a fitness journey like mine, then you should write things down. That was good advice then and it still is. Let me introduce to an app that will help: myfitnesspal. You can run it from your browser, Droid, and iOS devices. It helps you track what you've eaten, what you've done in workouts, and how much weight you've lost. It's really handy and has lots of neat features.

It's also very easy to use. When you enter your food, you can just take a picture of the UPC label and it will enter all of the nutrition information for you. If you go out to eat, you can enter the name of the restaurant and the item's name, and it'll do the same thing for you. This deftly addressed one of my biggest fears about FWSW. They told us to log all of our food, and I just figured it was a diet trick ... make me write it all down and I'd probably eat less just to get out of the paperwork! myfitnesspal has made it so much easier to do that you really should look into it.

When it comes to workouts, it doesn't do quite as well. You can enter things like treadmill or elliptical, and it will estimate your calories burned. That's handy, but I find that it doesn't record many of the activities I do ... and I'd love to get credit for all of those calories burned.

For instance, I regularly write database queries that move millions of rows from one table to another. That should be good for at least 500 calories burned, but I get no love on that one. Watching a thriller on TV? I'm sure that burns at least 350 calories for a two hour movie, and even more if it's real tense, but again, myfitnesspal doesn't know how to calculate that burn either. What about rolling my eyes when I hear someone say something stupid? I've checked three times already, and all I can do is roll my eyes in frustration at myfitnesspal's incomplete database. I figure there should also be an entry for using myfitnesspal ... it's easy to use, but hey, every calorie must be counted! I want full credit for the six calories I burned firing up the app!

Seriously, it's really helpful. I give it my full endorsement. We've been taught that people who keep a food journal are twice as likely to lose weight when compared to those who don't keep a journal. If you're serious about getting into shape, then you're going to have to be serious about tracking your food.

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