#Janathon Day 6 – My Noom Coach

Yay! Day 6! Day 6 is exciting because it’s a Tuesday, and actually I might not run for the next 2 days. Tomorrow I plan to do circuits at the gym, though I may or may not run there, and then on Thursday it’s back to Roller Derby scrim. So no hills for 2 whole days!

Today I went out at an astonishingly early (for me) 9am and ran the route backwards, because I’m a rebel. Not actually backwards, that would be really weird, but starting from the direction I normally finish in.

This meant I had a lovely down hill to start with, instead of an evil uphill, but it also turns out that some of those lovely downhills I remember from running it in the other direction are actually evil uphills, who knew?

1.5 miles, under 10’30” miles which I feel happy with without too much effort. Nothing to report in the way of killer three legged dogs or shoe lace untying incidents.
Because I am a rebel not only did I run the route backwards, but I also ran it in Yoga capris. These are from Boden, and I wear them for Roller Derby a lot and I’ve never been sure exactly what the difference is between them and running capris. Turns out they fit slightly looser than most of my running capris, so might not be as supportive on a long run, but I also liked the fold over waist band for not constricting my stomach. Plus they are the coolest pattern.

When I got back I refuelled from my 15 minutes of exercise with some disgustingly healthy oomf Protein porridge and a less disgustingly healthy cup of coffee.

In other news, I have a new toy and it’s the Noom app for iPhone. I exercise pretty well, I want to get better and stronger and faster and all that, but I already exercise 5 or 6 days a week, so next on my list is sorting out my diet so I can loose some body fat, gain energy and fit back into my trousers that I appear to have mysteriously grown out of over Christmas.

I’ve been trying it out for about a week now, and it’s pleasingly simple. You can log up to 6 meals a day, which I like as a tracking system as eating little and often is a good way to eat. Its database seems pretty comprehensive, though the bar code scanner hasn’t picked up a few well known items which have then turned out to be in the database once I’ve searched.

It counts only calories, which means it’s not so good if you want to use it to track your protein of other macro nutrients, but it does offer you guidance on your diet composition by designating foods as green, yellow or red and letting you know how your diet is measuring up with those foods.

You can log additional exercise to up your calorie allowance, but it took me a while to find the button that allows it as its at the bottom of the home page below lots of useful links to articles and questions to keep you motivated and inspired. Another useful feature of the app is the ability to set it to send you push reminders at certain times to remind you to log meals.

Being obsessed with food is never a good thing, but I think the simplicity of the Noom app and its ability to set reminders means you don’t need to be constantly think about it. We live in a world where we are constantly surrounded by food choices and keeping a food diary has been proven to be one of the best ways to be realistic about your diet and control your intake. I like how the colour coding system encourages balance. No foods are “bad” but some should, in an ideal world, be eaten more often than others.

If I had one complaint it would be that as a lover of statistics I couldn’t find any way to review how I was doing long term. It’s interesting when keeping a digital food diary to see how a week averages out. Did I eat mostly green or red foods last week? I know I went over my calorie allowance on Tuesday, but how much did I consume a day averaged across a week? Also, it’d be nice to have a weight maintenance option in the settings, currently the app seems to only be designed to track weight loss, and not everyone who wants to keep an eye on their diet and health wants to lose weight.

If you fancy giving Noom a go then you can visit the website to find out more about it here