Meal-Tracking Online

You ever have one of those work weeks that by Friday make you feel like you’re panting and out of breath?  I’ve had a couple of those back to back.  But my games have launched finally and the worst is behind me—back to the grind!

One of the most important tools you can possibly keep in your repertoire for weight loss and maintenance is meal tracking.  For weight loss, meal tracking can give you a sense of control over how quickly or slowly you lose weight.  Your meal tracker won’t make food decisions for you, but it gives you control over your accountability.  For weight maintenance, meal tracking is the perfect way to get yourself back on track—like when your company sends you to NYC and you decide to go a little nuts on NY pizza and street meat.  Hypothetically, of course.

I use a great meal tracker that was created by the 20/20 Lifestyles program that I did my weight loss with (they’re hoping to make the program available to the public in the future).  But there are a lot of great meal trackers online.

One of my good friends started using the LiveStrong.com My Plate program created by the Lance Armstrong Foundation (http://www.livestrong.com/myplate).  She’s found the program to have almost all features she needs to help her track her weight loss (as well as some health issues).  Here are her favorite features for My Plate:

• Provides numbers on calories, carbs, protein, fat, and sodium for each food.  You can create saved meals (foods consumed at the same time) and recipes which provide the same numbers.
• Huge database of foods (even my weird gluten free foods) including foods that don’t have calories on the package (like Whole Foods’ sausages).
• Tracks weight, exercise and water intake as well.
• Has reasonable calorie goals (although the goals for fat, carbs, protein are a little skewed towards carbs).  Can chart weight against calories and see if a change is necessary.
• Great recipe feature!  Since my husband and I cook together, and we usually cook multiple portions to reheat later.  What I do is I put all the ingredients into the system, and the servings, and it will tell me the calories/protein/carbs per serving (this helps me decide if it is worth making).  Then when we make it, I weight the pot empty and full and put into the system the total weight so that it will remind me what the right serving size is each time I have it.

Have you discovered any online (or offline) meal trackers that have been helpful?

Bouncing Back!

Well, my beloved Steelers let me down yesterday.  But you can’t win them all!  It was a good game, and—at least at my house—even better food!  I couldn’t resist cooking up a Pittsburgh classic: Kielbasa, pierogies and sauerkraut!  It definitely wasn’t a low-call kind of meal, but I have to let myself go every now and then.

I find that I’m getting much better at bouncing back to my normal routine when I let myself have these little caloric vacations.  I didn’t keep any of the leftovers (I know, my mother would be appalled), and I definitely didn’t force them on any of my guests (my biggest pet peeve ever)!  I did bring the extra cupcakes into work, but frankly it’s just payback for my coworkers who always have junk food sitting around their own desks.  I packed my breakfast and lunch today, and I’ve got my trip to the gym planned for tonight.

When living healthy is your daily routine, it’s not so hard to get back onto the right track if you take a small detour!

If you find that bouncing back is harder than you think it should be, take a look at your daily habits and routines.  Do you find that your own healthy lifestyle is your “normal”?  Or is it less a part of your daily schedule than you realize?

If you’ve made many healthy changes to your own life—and stuck to them for a while—do you find that you can bounce back pretty easily from these kinds of days?

Ready! Set! Eat?

People, I have discovered one of the most amazing tools ever!  Our friend over at Leaving Fatville turned me on to http://www.readyseteat.com/.  Awesome!  Ok, whether you’re trying to lose or maintain your weight (or just don’t care), this is the perfect website for planning our last minute dinners.

The basics: You tell it how much time you have and what kind of main ingredient you’d like, and then it spits out some quick and easy dinner recipes for you.  You can enter your zip code and select your normal grocery store (so that it can tell you what ingredients are on sale).  AND there’s a “Healthier Recipes” button to filter out the high calorie dinners.

Awesomeness:  The recipes are designed to be quick and simple, but flavorful.  You won’t have to go scrounging for hard-to-find ingredients, and you won’t be spending a fortune.  Once you register on the site, you can rate recipes and find other coupons and offers.

Pitfalls: Even the “Healthier Recipes” aren’t perfect.  If you’re trying to lose weight, the worst thing you could do is just pick one of their healthy recipes and assume the calories are low.  However!  It’s easier than pie to substitute what are obviously paid sponsor foods (like Banquet frozen chicken) and just use plain chicken breast in your recipe.

I can’t even tell you how thrilled I am!  I’ve been in one of those ruts where I’m eating the same five dinners every week.  While that’s ok with Mr. Husband, I’m getting bored and quick.  I can see me using this on the weekends to plan out my meals for the week (so I don’t have to make last minute stops at the store).

Any great suggestions on how to keep dinners simple but creative?  Any weekly timesavers you’ve discovered?  Favorite easy recipes?

Arming Yourself against Temptation

If I’m going to make it the next 3 weeks, I’m going to need a serious arsenal to deal with temptation.  I’ll tell you, I grab a coffee most mornings at the café in my building at work, and they serve the most delightful Chocolate Chip Espresso Coffee Cake.  Yeah.  I’ve got temptation staring me in the face.

So how do you deal with cravings and temptations when they’re knocking down your door?  In a previous post, I listed out a few fantastic strategies for dealing with cravings.  But honestly, you can never have too many tools in your toolbox for denying temptation.

Drink lots of water.  When I know I need to walk past the office candy bowl, I’ll drink an entire glass of water before I do.  By the time I get over there, my brain is like, “Please, don’t eat anything!  I’m going to explode!”  Granted, it’s only a short-term fix, but it guarantees you get your eight glasses each day.

Recall your last meal.  There was a British study done where women were asked to write a detailed description of what they ate for lunch several hours into the afternoon.  These ladies consumed one third fewer calories later in the day.  You might be like me and already recording most everything you eat.  But are you really thinking about it?  When you’re really evaluating what you’ve eaten, apparently it makes us more aware of our choices.

Meditation.  We’ve already talked numerous times about how most cravings are simply your brain releasing chemicals the affect the food you seek.  When that process is engaged, the most effective way to interrupt it is to get your brain working on another task.  If you remove yourself from your environment for a moment and put all your mental energy into one train of thought, often the craving will disappear.  “But I can’t just get away from work to meditate,” you say!  I’ve done meditation in the bathroom for a few minutes before, and it works wonders!

Give in.  I can hear your collective gasps!  There are a few times—not many for me, but more for some people—when you can exercise moderation and satisfy a craving with a very small portion.  When the Halloween candy started appearing in my office, I was able to let myself have one bite sized Snickers and not feel deprived.  My downfall occurred when later on I didn’t stop at one.  Some people can handle this strategy—and you know if you’re “some people” or not.

How do you handle your cravings?  Any good strategies?  How do you face temptation down and win?

I Seem to Have Lost the Band Wagon

The past week—alright, fine—the past couple of weeks have been my first significant weight gain since losing close to 100 pounds.  I’d like to blame the holiday specifically engineered to make us eat.  Oh wait, that could describe all American holidays.  You know, the holiday that’s all about eating candy.  Oh wait, that really only narrows the field by like one or two holidays.  Ok, I’d like to blame Halloween, but I can really only blame myself (ok, and maybe dopamine and opioids, but that really was an entirely different post).

This weekend, I was feeling so far away from the band wagon that no one on the band wagon would really be able to see what I was eating—so I ate a little of everything.  Let me tell you: everything was stinkin’ delicious.  I also now feel like a five-year-old who was allowed to eat whatever they wanted and now I feel completely ill.  I wish I could bottle this feeling and whip it out every time I’m about to over indulge.

Ok.  So here we are.  Post Halloween and counting down three and a half weeks until Thanksgiving.  My husband and I are taking an amazing vacation during Thanksgiving and I really don’t want to have to count calories.  So I need to track down the band wagon asap and get my butt back on it.

“What’s the game plan?” you ask.  The game plan is to make a game plan!  I’m planning out my meals again.  I also think I’ll be giving myself a few limits like: no eating any food at work or on the weekend that I don’t plan for.  I find this helps keep me in context when there’s temptation sitting around.  The next part of the plan is to make sure there’s no temptation sitting around.  I’m normally pretty irritated at other people’s insensitivity to temptation (like when a coworker throws a bowl of candy on your desk).  But I came into work today and threw my bowl of candy on another coworker's desk (gees, she’s so insensitive!).

I’ll also be making sure I don’t de-prioritize the gym—gym time has been getting the boot lately for other important tasks, like catching up on America’s Next Top Model.  I considered wearing my pedometer regularly again, but then I remembered I washed it (as in, left it in my jean’s pocket and did some laundry).  I’ll be stopping by Target on my way home from work today.

So how about you?  How do you get yourself back on the band wagon?  Tips and tricks?  And I’d love to know what kind of game plan you create for yourself for the holidays!  If you’re interested in guest blogging on how you survive the holidays, email me at liveitouteveryday [at] comcast.net.

Exercise vs. Calories

Hoo boy!  It has been a crazy work week and it is only Tuesday!  It’s looking like my schedule is going to stay this way for a while too.  I’ve been forced to start considering my priorities since my time and energy is an absolute premium right now.

I’ve noticed that when this kind of stress arrives, my tendency is to prioritize exercise over calories.  What I mean is that I’ll catch myself not tracking what I eat or how much, as well as making choices to eat a lot of high-calorie comfort foods, but still prioritizing my exercise classes and time at the gym.  I find that, for me, it’s easy to justify those bad food choices because I’m still prioritizing my gym time.  It’s easier!  I like the gym.

So which is more important?  The answer is that both calories and exercise are important to losing and maintaining your weight, not to mention your overall health.  If you’re looking to change your life for good, you’re going to need to make lifestyle changes to both how you eat and how active you are.  And both eating well and exercising complement each other: having the energy for an intense cardio work out is hard when I’ve been loading up on doughnuts all day, and I always feel so tired no matter how well I’ve eaten when I haven’t been to the gym for a few days.

But we all know that life happens.  And sometimes you just can’t both watch your calories and make time for exercise.  Over the long term, making one a priority over the other could be a big mistake.  The choices I have made in the past to prioritize exercise almost always result in weight gain.  Why?  You’ve heard it before: calories in, calories out.  It doesn’t matter if I’m burning 500 calories at the gym every night—if I’m eating 3000 calories in a day, that’s still 1000 extra calories that is going right to my fat cells.  I’ve learned that (if I have to choose) I need to prioritize watching my calories and tracking my eating.

Have you found the same for yourself?  Are there other ways you’ve found to work within limited time and energy periods of life?

Back on Track

It’s Wednesday and I’ve already had it up to my eyebrows this week.  I have made the conscious decision to eat my stress.  Even after all the planning, I’ll still get pizza for dinner or go out for lunch.  It’s been one of those weeks.

Since I’m already working through in my head what I’m going to do to get back on track, I figured I’d let you follow along.

#1 Meal Tracking – For me, tracking everything I eat is extremely important to my weight maintenance.  For some people, it helps them stay aware of how many calories they’ve eaten.  I mostly use my meal tracker to help me plan out my day.  On days other than today, I’ll sit down in the morning and plan out my breakfast, snacks and lunch.  Then I have a good idea of what to start thinking about for dinner.

#2 The Gym – Generally, even when I make bad food choices, I still don’t have trouble getting to the gym.  I love my gym!  This week, though, motivation has been low.  I need to spend some time thinking about my favorite classes, exercises, and why I like them.  I often find that listening to some of my favorite dance and workout music helps get me in the mood to work out, too.

#3 Focus on How I Feel – I’ve probably eaten around 1500 calories already today (with plans to go out to dinner), and I feel crappy.  When I eat like this, it never—and I mean never—makes me feel good!  Sure, I get that sugar-rush when I first eat these kinds of foods (remember opioids people?), but in an hour I feel sleepy and sluggish and tired.  Not to even mention a little sick to my stomach.  And I think I’m getting a headache.  Have I mentioned that I feel crappy?

#4 Just Do It – At some point, probably Saturday because I have plans to go out to dinner on Friday (I know, I’m just unbelievable, right?), I’ll get up out of bed and kick myself in the butt.  My inner dialog often goes like this: “What are you thinking?  Look at you.  You’re ridiculous.  You know what you’re doing, so stop it.  You know what to do, so do it!”  And then I’ll drag myself off to my 10am Body Step class and feel so good that I did!

Can anyone relate?  What do you do to get back on track?

Life-Long Maintenance

This past week was crazy as I was officially finishing up my participation in the 20/20 Lifestyles program. I took a final physical assessment (it’s amazing how fit I am!), final measurements, and my “After” photo.

I was taking the opportunity to think back over my mindset while I was losing weight and now as I look ahead. From the beginning, I’ve been putting into place in my life healthy habits and safeguards. I have and still regard these as life-long. This has not been a diet for me. This has been serious change that I envision doing for the rest of my life.

Diets will never work as life-long change! You’ll make severe choices (like cutting out all treats and sweets) by motivating yourself with the thought that it’s only temporary. Then, when you’ve decided you’ve had enough of the severe choices, you go back to the bad habits that got you to the point where you started.

We need to work realistic balance into our lives that we can maintain long term! When you commit to some healthy decision, spend some time imagining yourself making that decision again and again for the rest of your life. My commitment to meal track—I may not need to track every calorie I eat for the rest of my life, but I’ve worked it into my habits and can envision myself tracking all my calories until the day I die. For me, meal tracking is a very realistic commitment.

Think over healthy commitments you’ve made in the past and consider why they are commitments you don’t maintain today. How can you change those choices to make them more realistic and life-long maintenable?

Accuracy for the Win!

For the sake of today’s blog, we’re going to assume that you read yesterday’s, and—instead of whining about how you’d like to lose weight—you’ve started meal tracking to help do something about it. Now that you’ve simply started writing down what you’re eating, let’s chat about a few details that will help you keep a more accurate food journal.

Weigh everything. If you want to keep an accurate food journal, weighing your food is the key to truly knowing how many calories you consume. This isn’t to say you can’t simply measure you food. Just let me know which you think is more accurate once you’ve tried to squeeze apple slices into your measuring cup.

Know your serving sizes. If you’re weighing your food, then you might wonder why you need to learn about serving sizes. But it’s not always possible to weigh your food. Trust me: I’ve tried to squeeze my scale into my purse to take to restaurants. It’s these times you need to be able to look at your plate and estimate the amount of food you’re eating. There are lots of sites out there that can give you an idea of serving sizes, but I like Web MD’s interactive.

Get familiar with calories. As you’re entering food into your journal, you’ll want to start tracking your calorie intake. The best place to find this information is on the packaging of the food you’re eating. For foods that aren’t “packaged” (like fruit and veggies), there are a lot of sites out there that can help (About.com has one of the easiest to use). After a while, you’ll find that you know the calories of certain foods without even looking them up!

An accurate food journal is an important key to your success in not only losing weight, but staying healthy for the rest of your life! You won’t have to keep your journal forever, but keep it long enough that you can begin making healthy choices (or even not-so-healthy choices, but the right way) on your own.

Meal Tracking

You make an omelet for breakfast and nibble on a slice of cheese as you cook. You put together a peanut butter sandwich for your kids and lick the knife off before putting it into the sink. Your coworker gives you a couple M&Ms from the bag he’s eating while you’re visiting at his desk.

These nibbles, licks and bites can add up to hundreds of calories in a day! But if you look back over your day and try to remember what you ate, I’ll bet they don’t make it to your memory.

Meal tracking is simply writing down or recording somehow everything you eat. A meal tracker, or food journal, gives you an awareness around eating you probably didn’t have before. It also gives you the opportunity to look back over what you’ve eaten and analyze your choices and habits. When you don’t have it written down in front of you, it’s easy to reason away what you’ve eaten and why.

So, when you meal track, what do you write down? Everything! If you eat 3 M&Ms, then you record that you ate 3 M&Ms. You write down that lick of peanut butter and the nibble of cheese. After all, 2 teaspoons of peanut butter, a half ounce of cheese and 3 M&Ms add up to 145 calories! And, if we’re truthful, our nibbles, licks and bites are probably bigger than that.

There are online food journals (some free, some for pay), but the easiest way to start is to simply grab a notebook or open up a Word doc. Just start writing down everything you eat. You can even record the time you eat to help when you reflect back on what you’ve written. The important thing is to just start! You’ll find that you begin to build an awareness of every time you make a choice to eat which is a first step to gaining control over your eating habits.

Time Magazine has an interesting article about meal tracking: check it out here. There's some fascinating statistics that may make you grab that journal and start meal tracking today!