Just Completed week 5 run 3 and I'm really shifting the weight

[mattaitch]

Can't believe that I have run for 20 minutes, that's 1.8 miles!

Also I am ahead on my weight loss goal, under 15 stone, that's nearly 3 stone lost in just over 3 months, another 3 to go and I will be like a whippet. Burning ~500 calories on the run and the walk home really helps keep my net calories in check - today's breakfast was all but offset by the run, leaving me 1346 calories for the rest of the day.

I must recommend myfitnesspal.com/ and its Android app for tracking all this stuff, it's free and easy to use. I also bought endomondo pro for Android to track times and distances and so far I am really pleased with it although I don't use its calorie counts as they are higher than myfitnesspal's and I'd rather err on underestimating calories expended and over estimating calories ingested, and really that is all there is to losing weight.

Any how I'm really pumped and looking forward to doing week 6 and then doing week 7 & 8 whilst on holiday. We're going to Pembrokeshire and I can't wait to run along the coastal path with the sea air in my lungs and looking out over the waves.

Hurray for the NHS this program is brilliant

[Gridlet Graduate]

Fantastic! Well done!

[ladybugw Graduate]

That's brilliant well done. Impressive weight loss to.

[Valkyrie]

Wow, that IS impressive, Mattaitch! :-))

Can I ask, please, how do you work out the amount of calories you have expended? I'm about to start the programme (in about an hour, LOL) and would like to be able to work out the cals in vs. out - thanks!

[mattaitch Graduate in reply to Valkyrie]

Hi,

myfitnesspal has a simple interface where you add the number of minutes you spent doing a particular activity and it adds (or subtracts depending on your perspective) the calories from you daily allowance. You do the same thing with food, but there you put in the amount you eat (get some scales). It's surprising what you can expend doing things like gardening and housework and if you are like me you think "If I Kayak for 90 minutes this morning I can have a takeaway and a couple of pints tonight"

When I started out with myfitnesspal I was just watching my intake, then I started logging the exercise I was getting through walking, at first estimating how fast I was by using google maps to measure the distances I covered in each walk.

After I started C25K I got the free version of endomondo on my android phone and that will track your speed etc. using GPS. After a few runs I got the pro version for £3.99 as that has a few more features including better power consumption.

To be honest though the myfitnesspal logging is good enough, but I'm a techy and like spurious precision to the point that I drive my wife mad weighing my dinner and trying to get nice round numbers of grams

Good luck