Are you fit enough to run a small business?

One of the benefits of working in a corporate environment is that you have to get up and move, to the car/bus/train, the photocopier, the restaurant, meeting rooms, colleagues etc. During a day all those little trips can add up and at least you get some form of exercise, more still if you take the stairs rather than the elevator.

What happens when you break the habit and security of a monthly paycheck and work from home? Hands up how many of you forget to get out and get some fresh air or exercise? How many of us have slowly put on the pounds while working long hours sitting in front of a computer? Or eating the wrong things/snacking?

Sadly, I was one of those people too. Recently, I realised with a shock that things needed to change when my weight and cholesterol caught up with each other on the wrong side of normal. Uh-oh.

Apps for Health and Calorie Control

My daily food and exercise record

Never fear, there are tools out there that can help you change your lifestyle and monitor your progress. Last year I lost 20lb with the help of an app called LoseIt. Most of the loss was simply keeping my calorie intake under 1500 and the only form of exercise was regular walking, a hour or so most days.

In the app, you put in your goals (weight target, time scale etc) then add your daily food consumption and exercise expenditure as you go (see photo on the right for an example). It’s very easy to use and you basically just tell it roughly how much or how many of each thing you consume. This also creates a section in the menu for ‘My Foods’ so if you eat a lot of the same things regularly, finding them again is a breeze.

There are some occasional adaptations and workarounds needed though. For example, I like marmalade on my breakfast whole wheat toast, but it only has jam, so my basic assumption is that a tablespoon of either is about the same.

You can see I also ate more than my normal daily allocated amount of 1,500 calories thanks to 2 glasses of white wine, but the exercise gave me some leeway and I still ended up ahead, ie I lost weight

Notice though that an hour of fast cycling and 30 mins of walking burned over 1,000 calories. That’s pretty motivating to keep up the exercise plan!  Had I not done the exercise that day I most likely would have gained weight.

Over the last 4 weeks of cycling and watching what I eat, I’ve lost nearly 8lb, mostly due to the exercise. Another result has also been more fresh air and a chance to see some of the beautiful local scenery, such as this marina opposite Riverside Park, near the top left side of Manhattan – see photo below, which I took on Saturday at the halfway point.

Apps for tracking Exercise

The Marina at Riverside Park, Manhattan

Recently, I’ve also been experimenting with some new apps such as RunKeeper and Cyclemeter to record my exercise levels accurately. Part of the reason was to make sure I had the right amount of time and speed recorded for the LoseIt record and partly it was fascination with looking at the maps afterwards.

My favourite daily route in the evening is a tarmac’d road track in the local Liberty State Park, but unfortunately it is also a huge AT&T black spot. This means an equipment malfunction is guaranteed as the iPhone needs a functional GPS for the app to work. I solved this problem by driving the various bits of the route and adding up the milometer to derive an approximate distance.

The speed can be estimated from other rides on the New York side of the Hudson, such as this one on Saturday (see photo below). I recorded the return part of the journey from Riverside Park to the World Trade Center, where the train station is. Doubling the distance gives me my total distance on the NY portion of the journey (5.35 *2 = 10.70 miles) and a moderate pace.

Ride down the West Side Highway, NY

If you’re really nerdy then  various menus allow you to export the map, see the mile time splits and compare them to other days when you do the same route.  What was interesting to me was taking a simple screen shot of the map and posting it to Twitter and Facebook.  The encouragement and positive comments that I have received to date have really helped to motivate me, it’s like having cheerleaders and fans willing you on, which is lovely when tired and achey!

This morning, I nearly didn’t go out on the bike, but a couple of Twitter buddies tweeted that they too, had been motivated to go out and run a 5K (3 miles) route for the first time or complete a 40-50 mile bike ride. How could I not? The good news is that I finally managed 3 laps of Liberty State Park this morning (about 14-15 miles including the ride to and from the park) for the first time, w00t! Boy, that made me feel really good and the enduring post exercise high starts to get addictive after a while!

Benefits of using the apps

Three good things have resulted from these relativity small lifestyle changes:

1. A kiddies cancer charity, Cycle for Life associated with Tufts Floating Hospital for Children, is benefitting by my getting fit to cycle 25 miles next Saturday in Marblehead, Massachusetts (you can still sponsor me via the link)
2. I have a LOT more energy and creativity for work
3. I’m losing weight and getting fit, my dress size has shrunk already (yee ha!)

Now, that can’t be bad, can it?  Hopefully there won’t be a need for many more Fat Bird on a Bike blog posts

Obviously, there are many more apps out that can be used to help you attain your health and fitness goals and stay on track, so do add any you would love to share in the comments below.

Sally

About Sally Church
Sally Church runs a Pharma and Biotech consulting company, Icarus Consultants, for companies looking for a fast track to market. You can find her on Twitter @maverickNY
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