Share Your Successes

While there is no “special” diet per say for people with bleeding disorders, it is especially important for those affected to pay attention to what they eat.  Not only is a diet rich in lean protein, fruits and vegetables helpful in maintaining a proper weight, it also provides natural sources of many vitamins, minerals and nutrients that our bodies need to stay healthy and function properly.
For those who are trying to maintain a healthy weight by adhering to a calorie count, consider using social media or your personal contacts to share your successes.  Studies have shown this has had a positive effect on results. There are some great tools available to help keep track of both physical activity and food intake. HFA’s Get in Gear app is a FREE app that allows the user to track and log physical activity.  MyFitnessPal is a free app that allows the user to track what they eat.  Both apps allow you to share your efforts and results with your social media tribe.  Learn more from a recent article about the MyFitnessPal app.
Social Sharing Makes Losing Weight Contagious, Finds MyFitnessPal
May 1, 2014, 7:00 AM PDT
By Liz Gannes
MyFitnessPal is a popular smartphone app that helps people lose weight by tracking what they eat. It works a lot better when people share their food diaries with friends.
MyFitnessPal users who share their daily calorie counts with friends lose two times the weight, on average, of those who don’t share.
Users who share their food diaries with 10 or more friends lose four times as much weight as the average – an average of 22.75 pounds during the total time they spend using the app.
That’s according to a new analysis of user data as well as user surveys by the app maker. It seems to align with academic research about behavior spreading between social groups like a contagion, according MyFitnessPal VP Tara-Nicholle Nelson.
MyFitnessPal doesn’t have social features built in by default, but it encourages people to connect to friends via Facebook and email contacts. Starting today, the company’s apps – which are available for Android, iOS, BlackBerry and Windows – will also start counting steps so people can more easily measure their activity levels. (Update: Actually, only MyFitnessPal for iPhone 5s will count steps.)
MyFitnessPal CEO Mike Lee says the social workout research comes from “the biggest-ever longitudinal study of human health behaviors in history” – a.k.a. MyFitnessPal usage. “There are 60 million Americans trying to lose weight, and we have over 50 million registered users,” he said. “That’s a very significant portion.”
But it’s perhaps not quite as big as the company makes it sound, because 50 million users is the total number that has ever registered for MyFitnessPal – not the count of those who continue to use the product to track both food intake and weigh-ins.
Source: http://recode.net/2014/05/01/social-sharing-makes-losing-weight-contagious-finds-myfitnesspal/