The two most important things I’ve ever purchased to help me achieve my health and fitness goals are a food scale and a heart rate monitor.  I use them all the time.  I didn’t want to spend the money on either item at first, but they were well worth it. 

I just have a small, digital scale, the Taylor Biggest Loser scale, that measures up to 6.6 lbs.  It may not seem like a lot of weight, but if I’m eating something that weighs more than 6 lbs., I’m in trouble.  This scale has made such a difference in tracking how many calories I take in.  The other day I had some Rice Works brown rice chips (very good – I highly recommend) and the serving size was one ounce (28 grams/ about 10 chips).  Instead of counting out ten chips and trying to decide which broken ones made up one whole chip, I just put my plate on the scale, tore the scale and threw chips on the plate until it equaled  one ounce (the scale measures in grams, too).  I measure almost everything now because it’s easy, fast and kind of interesting!

The other tool, the heart rate monitor, tells me how many calories I burn when I exercise.  There are great tools online through Spark People.com and My Fitness Pal.com that give good estimates, but my Polar heart rate monitor gives me a much better estimate.  I wore it when I was shoveling snow one Saturday and was surprised to learn that I burned about 350 calories!  I play indoor sand volleyball on Wednesdays with my CEO, who is an AWESOME player by the way, and through my heart rate monitor, learned that I had burned almost 400 calories!  A lot of treadmills at the gym will pick up the heart rate monitor sensor so you don’t have to hold onto the handles to get a reading.

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