Getting my Gruve on

I work out at Anytime Fitness, just up the road from my house. I love it. It is small, I can go anytime (bet you couldn't have guessed that from the name, huh?) and it is never overcrowded. And it has the best class with a great trainer at just the right time for me 2 days a week. Fabulous. Recently, they offered a deal on buying a Gruve - it was half the normal cost, and it syncs up with their website, Anytime Health. I have wanted to try the Gruve for a while, since reading about others who got them at FitBloggin' last year, and so I seized the opportunity. 

The idea behind the Gruve, which was developed by the Mayo Clinic, is that it gets you to increase your movement throughout your day. It is a little device which clips onto your waistband and tracks the calories you burn/amount you move all day long. It has a little bar that you press which lights up, and it starts at red and then goes through a range of colors during the day until it reaches green. For the first week you wear it, you are in "assessment mode" so that it can get an idea of how much you are already moving. From then on, it sets a "Green Goal" for you to meet each day, a certain number of calories to burn. If you meet your green goal for several days in a row, it ups the ante. The focus of the product is to increase your Non-Exercise Activity (NEAT), drawing attention to how much you are moving around during your normal day. If you haven't moved in an hour, it vibrates three times to tell you to get up because your metabolic rate is about to drop. 

I have been in assessment all week, and starting today should be getting my goal. It is currently evaluating my week. So far, I really like being able to see how much I am (or am not) doing. I like the graphs, and I like that it encourages me to get off my butt. I work out 5 days a week, but some days after I hit the gym, I end up in front of the computer or reading for hours at a time, resulting in very little movement. Wanting to hit a certain number keeps me conscious of that. 

In addition, the Anytime Health website has a diet tracker, where you can track the calories you consume throughout the day. Now let me say, I loathe counting calories. Or at least I always have. Yes, I know it works, I know it is the best way to track what I am putting into my body, and I know that most successful weight losers do it. But it has always felt like so much extra work and so restricting and so time consuming. Well, I gave in and am using the tracker online. Some of my tracking isn't exact right now - I made soup and just did my best guess rather than adding up everything that went in there and then dividing it all out to see what a serving size was, etc. (I cook without recipes the majority of the time, so having to measure everything I am putting in there? Yeah, I am not there yet.) But it is pretty close, and so far it is resulting in some weight loss. And it is making me very conscious of what I am putting in my mouth. I realize that at some point it won't be enough and I will have to be more exact, but for now it is good.

So that is where I am at now. I still haven't found my rhythm with the healthy living thing - I lost it when my daughter had surgery and haven't regained it since, but I am going with the "fake it till you make it" plan, and hoping that high comes back and helps carry me through. 

Oh, and reading back over this, I realize it sounds like an advertisement for Anytime Fitness and the Gruve, but it isn't. Nor is it a real product review. Just me sharing what is going on in my life. 

Hope you all have a good day.