It seems I only update this blog when I have a new toy, so unsurprisingly, I have a new toy! Actually a couple, but the nice thing is that they encourage use of the old toys.

In addition to my very short exercise attention span, one of the issues I face in getting into shape is food. I don’t cook. I can, but I don’t. It’s just one of those things. That means I eat out a lot, and that I have a steady supply of frozen dinners. These things do not exactly have eating right built into the framework, even if I stick to Lean Cuisine (which are actually pretty good as far as frozen food goes).

I’ve tried a diet site in the past, but since the lowest they went for eating out was “frequently” not “all the time”, the suggested meal plans still included quite a few make at home dishes. I tried it for a while, bought the groceries and everything, and think I lasted about a week before I was trying to figure out replacements. Which, when you have no idea what criteria should be used to replace items, kinda defeats the purpose. I pretty much gave up at that point.

But a friend pointed me to myfitnesspal, which is designed for tracking calories and has convenient iPhone and iPad apps. I am having a surprising amount of fun tracking that, and their database seems to have just about everything in existence (one of the benefits of offering it for free, I suppose, as people will be inclined to add to it). I’ve only been using it for a couple of weeks, but so far I’m having some slow but steady progress, which is a nice change.

In addition to tracking food, though, it lets you track exercise. Since that adds into the daily goals, I’ve been more inclined to actually do it That meant breaking out UFC Personal Trainer again, at first. I’m 20 days into my second attempt at the 100 days in a row achievement. Hopefully no weirdness will ensue this time. (I still don’t know if I didn’t get it last time by missing a day, or it the track record got wiped when the rest of my personal data reset.)

After a couple of days of just that, I decided I wanted to play Rise of Nightmares through again on a higher difficulty, but it’s not a fitness game so it doesn’t track calories. Which means toy number two is a heart rate monitor. It tracks heart rate and calories burned. I think mine skews a little high, but since I can’t think of any other way to quantify exercise gained by killing zombies, I’m running with it

Keeping with the zombies theme, my third toy is a new app called Zombies, Run! I am actually considering using it by running, if I can find somewhere I’d feel okay leaving my headphones in, but for now I use the accelerometer mode and my recumbent bike. The game is part fitness tool, part RPG. A narrative plays out as you run, interspersed with music from your playlists. As they say, it sounds a little weird with the bike, since the narrative is built around running, but I’ve got a good enough imagination to get around that (Unfortunately, zombie chases aren’t available in that mode yet, but they are working on it.) I discovered today that after a mission (about 25 – 30 minutes) the radio station mode isn’t just music, but fictional DJs too. That kept me going a little longer than I expected, which is a nice change.

At the moment, I’m finding that all the things I want to play in the evenings are centred around exercise, so I’m going to enjoy it while it lasts. Now if I could just figure out a way to exercise while playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, that’d be perfect.