Counting the Calories

Late last year, when I had stopped blogging and exercising, I still kept up with reading about weightloss.  A lot of the articles I read point out that weightloss is 80% food/20% exercise (I just made the exact numbers up, but more food than exercise).



So, in order for that to make a difference, I needed to know exactly how much food I am consuming every day. Thank goodness I was on holidays for five weeks, because it can be time consuming. But the more I fill in, the easier it gets. So far, I've been doing it for about four weeks.

 

It seems I really do overeat. I should be consuming somewhere around 2100 calories, just to cover my BMR. I'm consuming closer to 2300. So, is it any wonder I'm not losing weight? I figure, I'm going to try to aim for 1900-2000 calories per day, in order to lose weight. This should give me weight loss of about 500g per week - a nice steady level of weightloss.

 

I started using an online website, called mapmyfitness.com because they allow you to log workouts as well as food. They have a database of food and it is possible to add a food that they don't have.  This is probably the part that is the most time consuming however.  There are a lot of foods which I eat that aren’t on their database.  It’s really frustrating to remember to hold onto to the wrappers or packets of everything I use in making food, just to then enter all the data in.  The website doesn’t currently have an app which syncs to the food diary, so I have to manually key everything in.

 

I know quite a few people in the blogosphere use myfitnesspal and I found out some of my friends use it too.  In fact, one of my friends lost eighteen kilos by using myfitnesspal.  I had a quick look at it and it seems that there are a lot more foods on their database than in the one I currently use.  So nearly two weeks ago, I swapped to myfitnesspal.  It has been so dead useful.   Nearly every food that I eat is there.  Especially handy as being in Aus, all our brands are different.  There must be a huge community of people using it, because even the supermarket brands are there. 

Myfitnesspal has calculated that my daily calorie limit, in order to lose 1lb per week, (450g) that I should be eating 1970 Calories/day.  I put the settings on the lowest exercise level because I haven’t been regularly exercising enough each week yet.  I think when I know exactly how my routine pans out, and I’ve been regular doing exercise three times a week, I’ll adjust the settings again to properly take that into account.

 

By Monday, I should hopefully see some result of trying to eat carefully.  Of course, my eating patterns haven’t been perfect.  There have been days when I have skipped breakfast because I was running late.  Days where instead of cooking dinner, I have eaten snacky food, like crackers and oat slices and fruit all evening.  Days where I have eaten two dinners.  Days when I’ve forgotten to log everything I’ve eaten.  Days when I’ve “forgotten” to log everything I’ve eaten.  Most of those days overlapped to make 3 days in total where I haven’t been on track.  But on the whole I think I’ve been pretty good.