As mentioned in the previous post, I had to search for a more efficient way to track my caloric intake. I scoured the web for calorie counters and calorie trackers. I searched for smartphone apps that might work. Some websites or apps would track calories, but you had to figure out for yourself how many calories you were taking in. Others had very complicated ways of tracking your calories. Yet others had food databases where you could enter a meal or a portion and it would figure out your calories and track them. Most of these had limited food databases, of only one, ten or even twenty thousand food items. Trust me, that’s not enough.
Then I found My Plate on www.livestrong.com. It’s part of Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong Foundation and it has all sorts of tools that will help you live a healthier lifestyle. “My Plate” is essentially a calorie and nutrition tracker. The amazing thing is the scope of foods in the food database! I searched for sorts of weird Asian and Spanish foods and not only did the foods come up in the database, it even listed different brands! I didn't know there were so many varieties of Filipino lumpia. There have been very few foods that I couldn’t find in the database. It's really easy to track calories. What’s more, there is a companion app for a smartphone that ties in with the website so that you can track your calories even when your computer isn’t available. The iPhone app is not very reliable, though, it crashes a lot and sometimes will duplicate food entries willy-nilly. Sometimes it will also record a huge amount of calories for meals that you’ve created on the web site. 300 calories for a cup of coffee? An update of the mobile app is supposed to be on the way.
On the website, you can create meals and accurately track the calories in your recipe. For example, as you build a meal or create a recipe it will track how many calories each component in your recipe has and total up all those calories. Then it divides the total calories by the number of servings your recipe contains. You can even make up those little nutritional data summaries that they put on food containers for your recipes. There are also recipes available from the thousands, maybe millions of other My Plate users. What's fantastic are the results. I've just cracked below 215 pounds and feeling for the first time that I might actually get below 200 pounds again.
Along the way, as you track you daily caloric intake and burn, you can also track your weight loss. The web site gives you these encouraging messages from time to time. I've been religious in recording my food intake and workout calorie burns since I started tracking last March. I haven't missed a day yet. They say that statistically, if you can keep tracking for 90 days, you'll have a much better chance of achieving your weight goals. By the way, Livestrong My Plate isn't just for weight loss, you can track calories for when you need to put on weight too. I haven't tried that part out.. Yet.
The Livestrong websites are full of invaluable information, particularly for cancer victims, and also provides support and information for people suffering from diabetes, etc. They're the most useful, no bull websites you can visit. Thank you Lance Armstrong, for creating the Livestrong Foundation.
2011/08/15
2011/08/08
Finally! I'm shedding the pounds, part 1
Under 215 pounds!
When my wife suggested I write a book about my weight loss odyssey, I laughed and told her it would be the world's shortest book (besides, I'm not the only guy ever to lose weight). Because it turned out to be so easy. It’s one of those epiphanies that you get and think, “why the heck didn’t I think of this before?”
Here it is in a nutshell: It’s all about calories, stupid! I quickly discovered that although I was riding my bike a lot, I was also eating a whole ton of calories during and after my rides, in the misguided belief that because I was riding hard, I could pretty much eat what I wanted. I’ll tell you right now, if you read some of the road biking magazines, they’ll sometimes have these little side bars where they give you a ride distance and speed and tell you what the equivalent you can consume in beer or Snickers bars. Don’t even look at that, if you’re serious about shedding the pounds. ‘Cause you’ll end up eating those Snickers bars and wonder why you gained weight!
I went to see a nutritionist in March and she gave me all sorts of information about the types of foods that I needed to eat, the proportions of carbohydrates, proteins, etc. There were simple sugars and complex sugars. Some turned into glycogen, others didn't. It seemed way too complicated. So of course, that all went in one ear and out the other. The only thing that rattled around in my brain was when she said, for your weight, you need to eat a net 1,900 calories every day to lose two pounds a week. She gave me a whole list of foods on about six or seven pages with the calorie counts for different servings so that I could figure out how many calories I was taking in.
That's all well and good, but how accurate was it really? The foods listed were pretty general (is it a big apple or a medium apple?) and I wondered how accurate the list was. Also, what about my workouts? How could I factor those burned calories in? How did I even know how many calories I burned during a workout? There had to be a better way to quantify all those calories so that they made sense to me.
Using the lists from my nutritionist, I felt I could easily be as much as 500 calories off in my calculations. I felt I needed to accurately measure and quantify what I took in and burned every day with a relatively small margin of error. As it turns out, it very possible with today’s technology. The key is to first be able to accurately measure the calories going in, second, accurately measure the calories going out. As I mentioned, it’s very easy to do with today’s technology.
I’ll digress here a little bit because I don’t want to give the impression that I totally ignored my doctor’s advice on the type of foods I was to eat and the proportions of carbs to proteins, etc. She was concerned about the possibility of diabetes setting in and aside from the weight loss aspect, she wanted to make sure I wasn’t going eat a lot of “crap”. I really wasn’t too worried about the type of food I was eating, because as the appointment with the doctor progressed, it turned out that my diet wasn’t so bad. I was more or less eating the correct foods, with some splurging here and there with foods I shouldn’t be eating. So I decided that I wasn’t going to worry too much about the type of foods I was taking in and worry only about my net calorie counts for the time being. I rarely eat white bread, for example, only whole grains. I rarely eat white rice. I eat a lot of nuts. I eat a lot of fruits and veggies. I never eat at fast food restaurants, and I don’t drink sodas. I always made sure that I had a lot of fiber in my diet. Believe me, when you’re in your 50s, fiber is all important! My main problem was that I simply ate too much for the level of activity in my life.
After muddling through a week after my appointment with the nutritionist, I realized that unless I knew with some degree of accuracy what was going in and out, it would never work. So I set out to find a way.
When my wife suggested I write a book about my weight loss odyssey, I laughed and told her it would be the world's shortest book (besides, I'm not the only guy ever to lose weight). Because it turned out to be so easy. It’s one of those epiphanies that you get and think, “why the heck didn’t I think of this before?”
Here it is in a nutshell: It’s all about calories, stupid! I quickly discovered that although I was riding my bike a lot, I was also eating a whole ton of calories during and after my rides, in the misguided belief that because I was riding hard, I could pretty much eat what I wanted. I’ll tell you right now, if you read some of the road biking magazines, they’ll sometimes have these little side bars where they give you a ride distance and speed and tell you what the equivalent you can consume in beer or Snickers bars. Don’t even look at that, if you’re serious about shedding the pounds. ‘Cause you’ll end up eating those Snickers bars and wonder why you gained weight!
I went to see a nutritionist in March and she gave me all sorts of information about the types of foods that I needed to eat, the proportions of carbohydrates, proteins, etc. There were simple sugars and complex sugars. Some turned into glycogen, others didn't. It seemed way too complicated. So of course, that all went in one ear and out the other. The only thing that rattled around in my brain was when she said, for your weight, you need to eat a net 1,900 calories every day to lose two pounds a week. She gave me a whole list of foods on about six or seven pages with the calorie counts for different servings so that I could figure out how many calories I was taking in.
That's all well and good, but how accurate was it really? The foods listed were pretty general (is it a big apple or a medium apple?) and I wondered how accurate the list was. Also, what about my workouts? How could I factor those burned calories in? How did I even know how many calories I burned during a workout? There had to be a better way to quantify all those calories so that they made sense to me.
Using the lists from my nutritionist, I felt I could easily be as much as 500 calories off in my calculations. I felt I needed to accurately measure and quantify what I took in and burned every day with a relatively small margin of error. As it turns out, it very possible with today’s technology. The key is to first be able to accurately measure the calories going in, second, accurately measure the calories going out. As I mentioned, it’s very easy to do with today’s technology.
I’ll digress here a little bit because I don’t want to give the impression that I totally ignored my doctor’s advice on the type of foods I was to eat and the proportions of carbs to proteins, etc. She was concerned about the possibility of diabetes setting in and aside from the weight loss aspect, she wanted to make sure I wasn’t going eat a lot of “crap”. I really wasn’t too worried about the type of food I was eating, because as the appointment with the doctor progressed, it turned out that my diet wasn’t so bad. I was more or less eating the correct foods, with some splurging here and there with foods I shouldn’t be eating. So I decided that I wasn’t going to worry too much about the type of foods I was taking in and worry only about my net calorie counts for the time being. I rarely eat white bread, for example, only whole grains. I rarely eat white rice. I eat a lot of nuts. I eat a lot of fruits and veggies. I never eat at fast food restaurants, and I don’t drink sodas. I always made sure that I had a lot of fiber in my diet. Believe me, when you’re in your 50s, fiber is all important! My main problem was that I simply ate too much for the level of activity in my life.
After muddling through a week after my appointment with the nutritionist, I realized that unless I knew with some degree of accuracy what was going in and out, it would never work. So I set out to find a way.
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