You may not think of yourself as someone who is comfortable using technology, but I bet you have at least thought about using technology to make it easier to get in shape. If you have dieted or exercised in the past couple of years, you may already be using technology to help you obtain your goals.  Websites like weightwatchers.com, fatsecret.com or loseit.com to help you track the calories and nutrition of the food you are eating.  Subscriptions to sites like biggestloser.com or jillianmichaels.com or bobgreene.com help you create both an exercise and diet plan to get in shape.

From Weight Loss Websites to SmartPhone Apps

Perhaps you have gone further into the tech depths and have used diet and fitness apps. Android and iPhone apps–Lose it! and CalorieCounter–help you track your diet, even scanning the food packages to retrieve the exact nutritional content.  Running apps –RunKeeper, Nike+ –can track time, your steps, calories used. You can even use apps to create a plan to go from coach potato to running a 5K (or marathon)! There is a plethora of apps to help you with exercises from weight training to yoga as well as guides to a skinnier you.

With these websites and apps, it’s become a lot easier to track your progress and get coached on what you need to do next to obtain your goals.

WiFi Scales to Track Fat and Weight Loss

Our weight is no longer the ultimate measurement of our health, fitness, or whether we look good in a bathing suit.  Now, we want to know how much of our weight is muscle and what percentage is fat.  We want to be sure our diet and exercise is helping us to lose those cottage-cheese-thighs or bowling-ball-belly and not making us weaker.  New wifi scales can automatically track your weight, BMI, fat percentages, and more.  They can even plug in to an app on your smartphone or TV (!) where it will suggest exercises to guide you to your goals.

Gadgets for Measuring Your Calories In and Your Calories Burned

We know that losing weight is about using up more calories than the number of calories that you are eating. This year, there are new gadgets available that go even further to measure your calories spent and your calories consumed. Not only do they measure the calories you burn during workouts, they monitor your calories burned all day long. These gadgets will track your sleep too, because there is a correlation between the quality of your sleep, your weight loss and your exercise/fitness performance.

There are heart rate monitors that can chart your progress and help you determine the intensity of your workout to go further, faster, or burn more calories.

Putting it All Together

These gadgets, apps, and websites are beginning to talk to each other, to integrate the information. With the aggregated information, you get a measurement of your actual calorie expenditure and weight loss. With this information there is no guesswork or estimating. If you aren’t losing weight when you work out, you’ll know if it’s because you aren’t working out as hard as you thought you were, or if you aren’t eating enough and your body is not letting go of fat. You’ll know when you can push yourself and when you need to rest.

Whether you are training for an event like a 5k, 10k, triathlon, marathon or ironman, or if you simply want to understand the best way for you to lose weight, these gadgets can make it easier for you.

While my goals are finishing an Olympic triathlon in around 3 hours and losing 30 lbs, I will show you how to use these gadgets for your own goals.

I plan to weave my make-it-simple magic to help us all understand how to get the most out of these tech fitness tools, and learn how to get in shape along the way. Not only will I teach you the buttons to push, I will interview trainers and health professionals to help decipher the information and get advice on how to use it.

Enough with why I am doing this and why you want to follow me on my journey.  Tomorrow…baseline!