At the beginning of the year, after realizing that I had completely failed at my weight loss goals for 2012, I signed up for Weight Watchers again. While there are free alternatives available, I had two reasons for this:
- If I’m paying for a service, I’m that much more likely to use it
- I was intrigued by their new ActiveLink gadget
A few friends were using the Weight Watchers ActiveLink, a little gadget the size of a flash drive, to assist them in their weight loss journey. It measures your movement in three directions and calculates your activity points for you. I really liked the concept behind this. One thing that I always struggle with is figuring out how many points or calories that I earned for a workout. I had a feeling I was overestimating. So this seemed like a good way to check it out.
In some of the reviews, people were complaining that they earned fewer points for their workouts. Okay, that’s something I expected. But then they started talking about their baseline and how it hurt the number of points the earned. But what is a baseline?
Your baseline is the amount of activity you should get every day based on your age and weight. Once you hit that amount of activity, then you can start earning points. Makes sense.
With the ActiveLink, you start out with a week of wearing it for an assessment. Unfortunately, until the assessment is done, you don’t know how many points you’re earning per day, so that week can be a bit annoying. But it’s worth it. After the assessment, I was put on a challenge to earn 4 points per day. Seems easy, right?
What I quickly learned was that I wasn’t getting to my baseline. On rest days and days that I lifted weights, I struggled to get to my baseline because I have a fairly sedentary job. And even with running and biking, I wasn’t always getting to 100% of my goal. (Other days, like on long run days and Team Fight swim days, I was easily surpassing it.)
So clearly I need to learn to be more active aside from working out. I’m making it a point to get up from my desk every hour. I use the bathroom on the floor down so that I have to take the stairs. My house is cleaner as well! If I get home and find that I’m still low on my activity, I clean something, just to keep my body moving.
I like that activity isn’t a single thing anymore. I don’t say “Well, I ran 4 miles, so I earned X points.” Instead, it’s “Today, including my run, I earned 4 points and hit my goal.” Because I don’t earn points until I have hit that baseline, it encourages me to stay active even if I worked out before heading to work. On Monday, for example, I ran 4 miles before work, but when I plugged in the ActiveLink, I still hadn’t earned any points. I was pretty close to earning a point though, since I was already past the baseline. So if I wanted to earn points, I had to be active throughout the day as well.
I’m hoping this time, the weight loss plan will be a success. I have the knowledge. I have the tools. My biggest downfall is that I let life events get me off track. This weekend, while my sister visited, we ate fairly poorly. It was an excuse to eat out, and I should have made better choices. Lesson learned. My ultimate goal is simply to get my BMI into a healthy range, though I would like to get my body back into the clothes in my closet that I have inadvertently outgrown as well. Nothing drastic, just down to a healthy weight.