I should catch you up

It's been a while since I posted anything. Between work, increased training, and now this evening class (that includes a surprising amount of homework!), I barely have time to do much but log onto PT and report my food and exercise.

So let's see... when we last left off, I was going through the assessment period with the Philips DirectLife activity monitor. I was assessed at a Level 3. This equated to "Elizabeth", who is moderately active and plays tennis for an hour twice a week. I thought the monitor grossly underestimated my activity. Vigorous exercise for 1 hour twice a week?? In reality, I'm doing about 14.5 hours per week of exercise with maybe 30% of that being high intensity.

Based on that information, the goal set for me was to increase my daily activity rate to 975 calories/day in 12 weeks. I will gradually increase the calories burned weekly. I'm 2 weeks into the program now and the first week's target was to burn 829 calories/day and the second week's target was to burn 843 calories/day.

Week 1 I burned on average 995 calories/day which was 122% of my target and week 2 I burned 1124 calories/day which equalled 136% of my target.

Hah.

It's not much of a goal if I've already surpassed the 975 calories "ultimate goal" in the first 2 weeks! It hasn't been too difficult to make the daily calorie goals. Though I don't always meet it, I end up burning huge amounts on longer training days which makes up for it since they take the average over a 1-week period. I admit that carrying the monitor around is somewhat motivating. I take it out at various times in the day to check my progress. However, since I know I won't have any problems meeting my quota for the week, I'm not particularly motivated to increase my daily activities, which I think is the point of the program.

I corresponded with my DirectLife coach, Erin, via email. I discussed my goals (Ironman + lose 10 lbs) but she didn't seem much help there. The coaches don't provide any nutritional or even weight-loss specific advice. They are just there to provide suggestions to increase your daily activities. I am mildly disappointed.

Now if I could find a similar device that works with monitoring food intake instead, I'd be set...