Salad, Sandwich and Swimming Challenge: Entry #2 (SUPER TRACKER)

Day 11 of the month long swim challenge!  Woot, woot !!  That’s one third of the way through and so far I’VE LOST TEN POUNDS.
Which is significant to me, at least.

So, the main lesson here is swimming and nutrition can really work in tandem to bring us closer to good health.
I want to spread this good news with everyone I know. All of the inside tricks and resources. ALL OF IT should be public knowledge. So, this blog is dedicated to assisting you in setting up your own super tracker. A.k.a the best resource ever for tracking your diet.
 

SUPER TRACKER

I’d like to introduce you to an amazing, excellent, 100% FREE resource with plenty of scientific research to back it up.
It’s a website produced by the USDA: https://www.supertracker.usda.gov
I learned to use this website in one of my nutrition courses at the University. They had us track our diets for a month as an assignment. It’s extremely thorough and backed by tons of scientific research.

It was also recommended by my primary care physician when I explained my goals to her.
First, you create a profile for yourself so that the system can calculate your dietary and fitness needs based off your age, current weight, goal weight, gender, etc.
Then, it helps you track your diet and exercise using the huge food and activity database.
The food tracker helps you plan in advance to adjust all of the food measurements until the fall into the correct parameters. Categories such as: daily calories, empty calories limit, saturated fat limit, sodium limit, oils limit, are all calculated and tracked.
There is also a graph to make sure you are getting the correct dispersion of whole grains, dairy, protein, fruits and vegetables. Which helps verify you are getting the right balance of nutrients and staying within the recommended guidelines to be healthy.
 

Activity Tracker

The activity tracker helps you plan out your physical engagement and workouts to make sure you are meeting the recommendation suggested after creating your profile.
There are hundreds of activities to choose from and the system can tell how long you need to do each activity to burn the right amount of calories based off your profile. For the purpose of this project, all I entered in was swimming. But the options are extensive.

Swimming with the ACTIVITY Tracker

There were multiple options for swimming to select from on the activity tracker.
All the different stroke styles are available (breaststroke, backstroke, freestyle, butterfly). Butterfly seems to burn the most calories by far…
But they also had two unexpected options. vigorous water play and water aerobics. To my surprise, vigorous water play burned the most calories of all.
So, as far as losing weight is concerned, swimming with your kids and having fun in the pool could be a great option!
 

For You

I hope this super tracker helps you as much as it has helped me.
If you Have any questions, feel free to post them in the comments section.