Tag Archives: weight loss motivation

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My Alexa Skills Update

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So, I’ve been pretty busy since my last Alexa Skills update! I’m now up to 25 with the certification of Recall The Date by Amazon on March 30, 2021.

Here are my 4 most recent Alexa Skills with a description of each.  Below that you’ll find a link to the updated list with the Skill Names, Descriptions, and Quick Links to find the Skill in your Alexa App.

What Should I Weigh – What Should I Weigh lets you determine in which of the 4 Weight Status Categories developed by the CDC you belong based on your height and weight. If you aren’t in the normal weight category, it calculates your normal weight range and tells you the minimum number of pounds you need to gain or lose to get within the normal range.  It will also give you nutrition and exercise tips, as well as activities you can do to burn the number of calories you specify.

Your Weight Loss Friend – Your Weight Loss Friend provides powerful tools for anyone on their journey to successful weight loss based on where they are on that journey.  Successful weight loss requires changing your eating and exercise habits.  Many experts in behavior change believe there are several Stages of Change through which a person moves as they work towards healthier habits.  Your Weight Loss Friend uses this approach to organize tools to help the user on their weight loss journey. Users can develop their Weight Loss Plan, log their Weights and Exercises, schedule Healthy Text Messages about nutrition, schedule Email Messages to help them move through the Stages of Change, learn what is a healthy weight for their height, schedule Weigh-In & Exercise Reminders, and get information about BMI, the Stages of Change, and more.

Grampa Wisdom – Grampa Wisdom is a humorous glimpse into some of the sayings and quotes as remembered by the developer of this skill, a Grampa himself. Those recollections are not always the sayings with which you may be familiar, but they are meant to be fun.

Recall The Date – Recall The Date is an easy way to log and retrieve the dates of the birthdays and anniversaries of your friends and relatives. After you have logged some, you can retrieve events for a given month or by the next number of weeks you specify.  It will also tell you whether there is an event for the day you open it, as well as when the next event you have logged will occur. These features will occur accurately for Time Zones within the United States and Canada and will be adjusted for Daylight Savings Time through 2030.

Click the link below to go to a table of my Alexa Skills or click the Download button on the right to download its PDF file:

Dr. Bob Alexa Skills March 31, 2021Download

What Would Help You Lose Weight?

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I Need Your Help

In designing a weight loss program, building in motivating factors and supportive tools is especially important.  If you are currently struggling with or have ever struggled with your weight, I’d like your opinion.  Please fill out the following brief survey to help prioritize the key drivers that would motivate & help you to adopt healthier nutrition and exercise behaviors that will lead to a healthier weight.

Survey Instructions:  For each of the following 6 potential components of a Weight Loss Program, please rank their importance to you on a scale from 1 to 5 where 1 indicates Least Important & 5 indicates Most Important.

What Do You Need To Lose Weight?

Questions For Father’s Day – What’s The Motivation? Will It Work?

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I recently saw a post on Facebook with a picture of a young girl, no more than 6 years old, holding a sign that said that her father told her that he’d quit smoking if she could get 1,000 “Likes” for that post.  The last thing she wrote on the sign was, “I love my dad!”

My first reaction was that this is wrong on so many levels.  The father has put his daughter in the position of being responsible for his trying to quit smoking.  If she doesn’t get the 1,000 “Likes” he won’t even try – and to her young mind, it will be her fault!  When he gets sick from smoking & possibly dies before she graduates high school, she may feel guilty because her post wasn’t good enough.

I thought, if the story is to be believed, the father has no intention of quitting.  He just wants to use this as an excuse to continue smoking.  As I said before, motivation has to come from within for it to be effective.  You would think that if he loved his daughter, he wouldn’t need any more “Likes” than her encouragement to quit!  If she gets the 1,000 “Likes” how will that translate into motivation for her dad?  Can dad call any of them to get encouragement when he wants to light up?  Though in my experience this kind of motivation is extremely weak, perhaps this will do the trick for this father, and he’ll feel compelled to keep his word.

Naturally, I was curious about how many “Likes” she did get, so I clicked through to see the original post.  It was originally posted in the Spring of 2014 and when I looked at it, there were over 5.9 million “Likes” and counting!!    I imagine this huge response was on behalf of the girl so she wouldn’t fail.  The ball was in the dad’s court.  Unfortunately, nowhere did I see any update that the dad had quit smoking.  I hope he has.  I hope he found the motivation he needed not from the millions of “Likes”, but from the look of love in his little girl’s eyes and his hope of living a healthier life and being part of her life for as long as possible.  I hope that dad has quit smoking for good so that he & his daughter can enjoy many, many Father’s Days together.

What motivation has helped you adopt healthier habits around smoking, eating or exercise?  Please share your experiences on this blog!

For Your Health! – Dr. Bob