Tag: nutrition graduate

Calorie Counting: Is it good for you?

trulyraisa6 Comments

Hello everyone! Welcome back to my corner! Today I’m bringing you another nutrition-related post and this post is about calorie counting. Shall we begin?

What is Calorie counting? So just to summarise it it’s basically when you count the calories of everything you eat during the day. You can keep track of your calories just by looking at the nutritional labelling on the front of packaged foods, but these days technology has become more advanced and there are now apps that can help you do this! There is apps like MyFitnessPal and Lifesum which are really good to use!

Now I’m gonna start with the bad side of this, because I’ve heard that people who calorie count then end up having bad relationships with food, they may miss some meals or restrict their diet and eventually that leads to finally giving in and binge eating. That is mainly the case with calorie counting it can go a good way, where you don’t restrict what you eat but you learn to have a balanced diet while also eating within your calorie limit. These calorie counting apps allow you to set a certain limit and will give you a recommended number of calories to eat during the day. With technology and wearable devices such as Apple Watch and if you are an iPhone user like me you can connect Apple Health and track your steps. You can also search and add any exercise to your diary and count how many calories you lost!

I am currently using the LifeSum app and for me it is working great! I can scan the barcode of any food item and track what I eat througout the day, my steps for the day are automatically counted and I can see how much calories I have burned. The LifeSum app has an amazing range of foods that you can search and add to your food diary, this especially works if you’re from an ethnic minority like I am and you can search for your own culture’s foods I found many pakistani foods on here. I can set a personal goal in my profile if I want to lose weight or maintain weight or gain weight and Lifesum automatically gives me a recommended amount of calories I can eat daily.

It’s a very easy and user friendly app that helps you to manage your diet more effectively and to lead a healthier lifestyle. The best part is you can choose to pay for a premium account but there are a lot of accessible features on the app that are for free users too!

This is what your food diary page looks like. You can track your calories here!

I really enjoyed my experience with the app and I did reach out to the company by email in the hopes of maybe supporting them in the future or becoming a brand ambassador but sadly they have not yet replied to my emails, inshallah I hope one day in the future they will!

Overall, to summarise I don’t believe calorie counting is all bad as long as you can still manage to keep a healthy, balanced diet and not to restrict yourself too much then you will see the best results and also have a good relationship with food! I hope you enjoyed this very short blog post discussing about calorie counting and I’ll see you again next week inshallah!

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Life update: Getting back to blogging!

trulyraisa2 Comments

Hello! Welcome back it’s been a while. A lot happened since I was last writing here and I want to explain everything and also share with you some plans for this future with this blog! Shall we begin?

First of all I have some good news to share! After a good 10 months I think it is? Or maybe more, but anyway ever since summer 2020 I’ve been looking for a full time job and I finally got one!

I’m actually very lucky to have this job because the job market in London during this pandemic has been nothing short of chaos. People have been losing jobs, graduates are struggling to find jobs because of lack of experience. There are more experienced people now who are applying for entry level jobs aimed at graduates and leaving university graduates without any experience or a chance at a job. It’s been a month since I got a new job and to this day I still find it unbelievable that my manager picked me out of other candidates to give me a job offer. From my point of view, I felt like that wasn’t my best interview but I feel like the fact that I asked questions to the empoyer really impressed them!

So to introduce my new job, I actually work as a laboratory assistant for a clinical research team in a hospital! I’m loving it so far and although it’s not directly related to nutrition I still can work in a healthcare setting. It’s a really successful hospital that also has it’s own nutrition and dietetics department so if I wanted to shadow a nutritionist and gain some experience there is a lot of opportunities for me to develop my career! I’ve loved working there for the past month, I’ve learnt so much about working in a clinical environment as well as meeting some really nice colleagues and enjoying everyday there!

Although, I am loving my new job and learning a lot, I have been very very busy and I just can never seem to find the time to sit down and produce any content. So now, that I’ve actually settled into a routine, I decided to make some time (and sacrifice some sleep) to writing more blog posts and creating more content! I feel like I always write posts like this, explaining how I’m going to blog regularly and then I just stop but this time I am going to actually try and commit to it! I’m going to designate a day in the week where I plan what blog post I’m going to write, and one day will be kind of like a “marketing” day where I’ll create some instagram stories and work on promoting my blog. And one or two days actually writing out a blog post and then scheduling it to publish! So that’s how I’m going to plan out my week and hopefully inshallah it will work and I can finally reveal something that I’ve been contemplating about this blog on for some time! Until then, I’ll leave you with some photos that I’ve taken while exploring London!