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[telophase]

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. :)