Getting Healthy in the New Year

If you’ve decided that 2020 will be the year that you get healthy by either…

• eating less, or
• getting more exercise,…

… we have some tools that can provide information you might find useful, even if you’re nowhere near as obsessive as someone who rolls out of bed in the morning and steps onto a body fat measuring scale might be about it! Here’s a short guide.

How Many Calories Are You Really Eating?

If your weight is fairly stable, our tool can give you a good idea of how many calories your body is actually consuming from the food you eat, which might be very different from what the numbers listed on the nutrition labels on your food’s packaging indicates.

What’s Your Body Fat Percentage?

This tool will estimate how much body fat a person with the height, weight, age, and gender can statistically expect to have. How much you actually have will require taking some detailed measurements with specialized equipment, ideally by a trained health professional who knows what they’re doing, where our tool will give you an idea of how you might compare to the statistical average.

How Many Calories Are You Burning While Running or Walking?

If your idea of a workout involves a treadmill, it probably tells you that walking or running the same distance involves burning the same number of calories. This tool is based on research that says otherwise!

Gameplanning Your Thanksgiving Calories

While this tool may not be relevant for you until November, you might find it useful for planning how you’ll keep the number of calories you consume within reasonable limits when the holiday season begins.

How Much Diet Soda Is Safe to Drink per Day?

Our tool considers the health impact that drinking diet soda might have on your health from its two most concerning ingredients: caffeine and the artificial sweetener aspartame.

Calories in Popular Alcohol-Containing Beverages

Following the holidays, you might be starting the year by observing “Dry January”, but if the calorie content of popular alcohol-containing beverages comes to concern you during the course of the year, we’ve presented a dynamic table to give you an idea of how many calories you might be imbibing whenever you might imbibe.

Walking It Off

Did you just eat something that had way more calories in it than you ought to have eaten? Our tool will estimate how long it might take you to walk off the extra calories you just ate.

Your Maximum and Target Heart Rate

If you’re going to really get your blood pumping by exercising, you might want to take advantage of our tool for estimating your maximum and target heart rate to avoid overdoing it.

How Much Weight Will You Really Lose?

Tracking calories in/calories out is how many people plot their progress toward achieving a healty weight, but that method fails to consider how your metabolism changes in response to how much and what you eat and how much you exercise, where all the calorie counting you might do can become a total waste of your time. The National Institutes of Health offers a Body Weight Planner that’s based on some of the best research that’s been done in nutrition and metabolism that can give you a better idea of what to expect from your ‘get healthy’ regimen, where we reviewed an earlier version of their tool.

Here’s hoping you have a happy, healthy new year!

Image credit: alan KO