For the last few weeks I have been using a free online service called My Fitness Pal to 1) to establish my daily caloric goal to cause weight loss 2) track what I am eating and convert it to a caloric total and 3) track my exercise to calculate its impact on my caloric intake. My sister had tried it and recommended it. On the whole, I am pleased with how it has turned out.
I googled the site and was able to set up an account in a few minutes. The biggest negative happened almost immediately. It put me into some video of people with good bodies (now) selling a weight loss program. While it may have been a good method, I did not like the hard sell right away. For those of you who are more technologically savvy than me, there may have been a way to cut it off or avoid it altogether. After watching for a couple of minutes and seeing what it was, I wondered out of the room and waited for it to be over. Nothing like that has happened since, although I think I am getting a little more spam for dating services, etc.
On a much more positive note, after answering a few background questions, it assigned me a daily caloric goal. According to the program, if I eat 1900 calories or less per day, on average, I should lose a healthy 1 lb per week until I reach my goal weight of 178 lbs. At the end of each day, I enter the type and amount of food I have consumed. For example, if I ate a hamburger, I would enter that and it would give me approximately 15 different choices of kinds of hamburgers from different restaurants or home made, bun or no bun, same for cheese. I pick the closest one and it assigns a caloric value. Sometimes the choices are a better fit than others, and for it to work, you have to remember everything you ate and accurately estimate the quantity. Each item could be more or less accurate, so there is a certain lack of precision/margin for error that you have to live with, same way with the calories burned associated with various forms of exercise.
However, on the whole, what you end up with is a reasonable estimate of the number of calories consumed and expended in a day. For someone like me, before I did this program, I really had no idea how many calories I should be consuming. Because it is fast and easy, it does not take much time at the end of the day - maybe 5 minutes. The best part is, it gives you lots of encouragement. I know it is just a computer program, but when I sign in there are messages like: "CC has logged in for 5 days in a row" or " Yesterday, CC burned 248 calories doing 1 hour of yoga!" Hey, I will take praise wherever I can get it. There is also a social component that lets you know what your friends are doing to lose weight.
Finally, after it has done its calculations, it says "if you ate like this everyday, after 5 weeks you would weigh XX". While I do not always like the answer, it is good to get the feedback and see the impact of the trajectory I am on. And did I mention that it is free?
I googled the site and was able to set up an account in a few minutes. The biggest negative happened almost immediately. It put me into some video of people with good bodies (now) selling a weight loss program. While it may have been a good method, I did not like the hard sell right away. For those of you who are more technologically savvy than me, there may have been a way to cut it off or avoid it altogether. After watching for a couple of minutes and seeing what it was, I wondered out of the room and waited for it to be over. Nothing like that has happened since, although I think I am getting a little more spam for dating services, etc.
On a much more positive note, after answering a few background questions, it assigned me a daily caloric goal. According to the program, if I eat 1900 calories or less per day, on average, I should lose a healthy 1 lb per week until I reach my goal weight of 178 lbs. At the end of each day, I enter the type and amount of food I have consumed. For example, if I ate a hamburger, I would enter that and it would give me approximately 15 different choices of kinds of hamburgers from different restaurants or home made, bun or no bun, same for cheese. I pick the closest one and it assigns a caloric value. Sometimes the choices are a better fit than others, and for it to work, you have to remember everything you ate and accurately estimate the quantity. Each item could be more or less accurate, so there is a certain lack of precision/margin for error that you have to live with, same way with the calories burned associated with various forms of exercise.
However, on the whole, what you end up with is a reasonable estimate of the number of calories consumed and expended in a day. For someone like me, before I did this program, I really had no idea how many calories I should be consuming. Because it is fast and easy, it does not take much time at the end of the day - maybe 5 minutes. The best part is, it gives you lots of encouragement. I know it is just a computer program, but when I sign in there are messages like: "CC has logged in for 5 days in a row" or " Yesterday, CC burned 248 calories doing 1 hour of yoga!" Hey, I will take praise wherever I can get it. There is also a social component that lets you know what your friends are doing to lose weight.
Finally, after it has done its calculations, it says "if you ate like this everyday, after 5 weeks you would weigh XX". While I do not always like the answer, it is good to get the feedback and see the impact of the trajectory I am on. And did I mention that it is free?
Consumption:
Raisin Bran and Bran Chex cereal with milk
2 string cheeses
3 slices of Havarti with crackers
Yogurt
2 glasses of Orange juice
Taco salad with beef, cheddar cheese, sour creme, taco shells
Exercise:
Non
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