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So I'm using a website (I loathe the name with a passion) to track my food intake and exercise, because of all the things I've tried over my life to lose weight and eat helthier, the only things that have worked are counting calories and exercising at the same time. (Gosh, what an insight. :D) At any rate, I like this site because it gives you a calorie target to aim for depending on your height, desired goal weight, short-term goal, and whether you want to gain, lose, or maintain your weight, keeping you gaining or losing at a healthy rate.

The target is amazingly generous, at least for us amply-sized people. It originally gave me 1800 calories as a target but after several days on that, I couldn't bring myself to believe that I'd lose any weight with that amount and rounded it down by 200, reasoning that these targets are based on a formula that works for people who are fit, and as fat burns a lot fewer calories than muscle does, the results of the formula should be skewed high. A very nice piece of justification, if I do say so myself. 1600 seems a better target to aim for after 2 weeks on it - it requires me to change my eating habits a bit more, but I don't feel deprived. I've done the 1200/day type diet before and while I lost weight I was still dieting, not changing my eating habits, feeling deprived, and prone to binging and falling off it.

And that calorie total isn't just a food-intake thing, it's a daily total energy intake thing, which means that if you exercise, the calories burned count against that total. 10 min on an exercise bike at 12 mph burns a bit under 100 calories, so the web program takes that off your total.

it also tracks some nutrients if you ask it to - fat, saturated fat (the currently faddish villain), carbs, protein, etc. I've got it tracking those and my calcium intake - the lactose-intolerance thing means I have to be careful about that - and have set targets of my own for some of them, and it tells me when I've been eating too much or not enough of something. :D

What this all means is that on a day like today, when I ate lunch as my first meal (hey, I woke up at 10:30, ate at 11:30 - it's not like I skipped breakfast XD), worked until 5, and came home and made a pasta salad and bean/tomato dish for dinner so I'd have leftovers for lunch this week, then got on the bike for 30 minutes, it's damn hard to hit that target. The website is currently shrieking at me that I haven't eaten enough calories today. XD I ended up eating Raisin Bran with (lactose-free) whole milk after dinner, just to attempt to get near the target (still haven't made it - 300 under). I feel a very weird kinship with those of you who have trouble eating enough food to keep your weight up. :)

I wouldn't have worried about it, except that I was under the target yesterday, too, and I know the point of eating enough to hit the target is to keep your body from going into starvation mode, and to kep yourself from binging. But I do like it that with careful management, I can eat lunch at Subway and have my usual Spicy Italian sandwich with chips and a Dr Pepper (855 calories total, mind you) and still have trouble hitting the target. XD This is the sort of eating I think I can maintain over the long term.

Anyway, it all seems to be working - in the three weeks I've been actively using my subscription, I've lost eight pounds. The site's shrieking at me that I'm losing weight too fast, but (a) the first pounds always come off easier than the rest and (b) I need the psychological boost. :) I figure in a few weeks it'll even out as I hit the first plateau.

I bought the subscription about six months ago in a fit of OMG I MUST DO SOMETHING, and I'd been reading rahoi.com, who lives in China and the States and lost a chunk o'weight (111 pounds) - mostly by dint of sending his wife and kids to China, staying in the States, and eating dramatically less and exercising a lot while not being distracted by them, I think (ETA: His post on it.) - and has managed to keep it off for a year so far, and it was one of the sites he recommended. After two days of messing with it, I ignored the site for six months. Got back into it three weeks ago, and haven't lost interest yet, and I'm hoping the Strattera helps me stay focused on it.

The amusing-yet-annoying part is when I signed up, I put in my starting weight, which was totally wrong because I didn't have any scales. Once I bought some three weeks ago and started using them, I was actually fifteen pounds over the weight I'd entered. So even though I was losign weight, at the weekly check-ins the site was telling me it was concerned that I was steadily gaining over the past month. XD I finally figured out how to put a fake weight-in before my first real one, and put my starting weight there. It being concerned that I'm losing too fast is much better than it telling me I'm gaining. :)

Here's hoping I stay interested enough in it to keep going. :)

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Here's hoping I stay interested enough in it to keep going. :)

I wish you luck. I'm cheering for you. I need to do something about exercise, too....

Thanks! :) The bike is working great for me. My requirements for being able to exercise and keep exercising were: (a) in my home because I hate having to go out in public and fight for machines and stuff (b) enough of a toy to keep me using it, so just walking or something wouldn't work (c) low-impact because I have back and knee problems and (d) not a regular stationary bike because the seat always hurts. :) I've got a cute little stairstepper thing that cost $40, but the steps aren't really deep enough to give a cardio workout, so it's just muscular. Which is not bad for exercising your legs, but cardio is what really burns off the calories. I also had to give myself permission to not overwork. I almost always overwork, so I feel weak and tired and muscle-hurty for the next day or so, which means I'm ten times more likely to start skipping workouts. I could exercise way harder than I am now, but at my current rate I'm actually exercising daily, instead of once or twice a week.

Just out of curiousity, what does the afor mentioned website say about types of biking? Because mt. biking can be much more difficult than a stationary bike, and I don't know how to calculate my caloric burn from it.

P.S. I'm thinking of doing this too. You've been quite helpful in motivating me to help myself. :)

It's pretty simplistic in the exercises it offers and assumes you're in the gym, but you can put in your own custom exercises*, so once you looked up what mountain biking was in terms of calorie burning, you could add it and it'd be happy to track it for you. :) I'm seeing wildly varying estimates online for mountain biking, though. I figure everything is only vaguely approximate anyway - I know that the nutritional components listed for foods on packages and calorie charts are only approximations and averages.

* And your own custom foods - the recipes I make that aren't in the database, I work up the rough nutritional components from the various ingredients and put the recipe in as a custom food.

I think the number of calories a day depends on ones age (The older we get the less calories we can burn). There is not a "perfect" number. I think the secret of a good weight control is ...Gosh, what an insight. :D, again....1) Breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, dine like a poor man. I am comfortable with my weight. I am almost vegetarian, so that also helps. Vegetarian food usually has ridiculous amounts of calories and if you look carefully, you can find very delicious meals. My diner is usually a light (100 calories) yogurt and that's all! I eat a prodigiously amount of calories during my breakfast. Indian restaurants are very vegetarian (Obvious, they don't eat cows), so I'd recommend you to start with their food.
Don't snack (anything at all), it's not needed.

Gosh...I sound like bossy...sorry, just wanted to give you my input XD

Hee. :D Yeah, part of it is aging, as your metabolism slows down.

The problem with not snacking is that I'm one of those people who's really built to eat five or six very small meals a day instead of three larger meals. I can't eat very much at one sitting, plus eating six hours apart causes my blood sugar to crash and makes me prone to migraines, especially on a day like today when I woke up WIDE AWAKE after five hours asleep - I can't let myself get hungry today, otherwise I risk a migraine. Eating almost nothing at dinner does that too, because the blood sugar crash overnight makes a migraine the next day a bit more likely. As I lose weight and my system stabilizes, the blood sugar problems *should* go away or at least improve, from what I understand, though.

But the one thing that helps me, and has helped in the past, is just writing down everything I've eaten. It keeps me aware of what's going into me, and it's easier to think - hey, I had a really big lunch today, I should pick some of *these* foods for dinner instead of those other foods.

I understand. Migraines are nasty....You do what your body needs, and if it's food, well, make sure you are reading a good manga because to me, eating a good meals without reading/watching a manga is a waste of a good meal....

If I eat too much at night, I cannot sleep and usually I have nightmares...everybody is a different world ain't it?

:D Yes, it's strange world, isn't it? XD

I use sparkpeople.com for the same thing, and it's free. If you decide you don't want to keep on the subscription, you might check it out.

Cool, thanks. :)

saturated fat (the currently faddish villain)

Actually, it's trans-fats (partially hydrogenated oils) that are the true villain, but saturated fats are second.

Right now I'm providing such huge amounts of saturated fat to a 20-lb. baby every day, I need a website to remind me to eat more bacon and ice cream. ;-D

I can't ever keep track of all of that. I just stop worrying about it and eat. XD

Mmmmm, bacon.

So, does it know what calories are in foods, and you enter how much you ate and it tells you this was 200 calories or whatever? I want to track calories but I am lazy and I also have to eat mostly home prepared foods (allergies, yay)....I could do with something that does it for me. Doing it all myself=too much math.

Yup! You put in that you ate, say, a cup of grapes and it tells you it's 300 calories. (I was appalled to realize how many calories grapes had. XD Although I'm not going to stop eating them or anything, because they have lots of good stuff in them.)

For things like the mashed potatoes I make, I made a Custom Food, because I don't know what the recipe they're calculating on is. I measured how much potatoes, butter, and milk went in, then worked it out from the individual values of each of them, and now can put in that I had, say, a cup of My Mashed Potatoes and it uses the amounts I put in. The food database is pretty extensive, and there's a lot of packaged foods, brand-name foods, and restaurant foods in it.

flos_campi says that www.sparkpeople.com does much the same thing, but for free. I haven't played around there so I can't tell you what the differences are.

* Sorry, 3 cups of grapes = 300 calories, as I found out after eating them. :)

Steph, I am so proud of you for doing this. I can't wait to have this baby so I can go back to my weight loss regimen. I would love to walk but it hurts too much and yoga is no go till after I deliver.

Congrats on your weight loss and may I please have your physical address I want to mail you an announcement once Hans decides when he wants to be born which hopefully will be soon, very soon.

Thank you! :D According to the scale I'm about 10 pounds down right now, but since my first weigh-in was when I was wearing a lot of clothing (hey, it was cold!), it's probably closer to 7-8. I'll feel that it's working once I get back into one of the two pairs of jeans in my bottom drawer. XD

Stephanie Folse
8804 Nikos Pl. #199
Fort Worth, TX 76120