My Fitness Pal

 Alright, it's time to introduce you to my secret numbers and my secret weapon.  I do this for two reasons; the first being that with greater honesty will hopefully come greater accountability and weight loss success, and the second being that I recently came across this blog where this awesome woman is killing it weight loss and is super candid about it all.  I was inspired.

So on February 28th I got this free app called MyFitnessPal and started tracking my food and weight.  I entered my beginning weight, my goal weight and my fitness level (which I actually left at sedentary) and it spat out my magic number of allotted calories...1400.  I was very vigilant and tracked everything that went in my mouth.  As you can see by the first photo, the first 10 pounds came off in no time, but things have definitiely slowed down as of late.  Once I lost the first 10 pounds the app told me to recalculate my numbers and then lowered my allotted calories to 1220 per day, which is figuring for a 1.5 pound loss per week. 

The crazy thing is that it works.  As the weight was coming off, I was feeling empowered to keep going and was pretty strict about my calories.  Greg even joined and got the app and we spent a few months scanning barcodes and adding up our food before we ate every meal.  For each meal you click "add" and then search for whatever you are going to eat/drink.  Once you add something once, it remembers it so it's easy once you establish a big database of your regular foods.  It will even give you totals for each day or week of your nutritional intake, fat intake, vitamin intake...etc. 

When I started this, my eyes were quickly opened (as I have blogged about before) to the actual caloric and nutritional value of things I regularly consume.  My regular Starbucks iced vanilla latte can eat up as much as 300 of my daily calories.  Some apple juice is easily 100 and forget about popping a piece of cheese in my mouth, 80 calories thank you very much.  But just as my eyes were opened, my stomach was shrunk.  It was hard but it only really took a few days of feeling hungry to shrink my stomach.  Eventually I didn't even want to eat like I used to and I was more easily satisfied. 

So below is what the weigh in screen looks like. When you record your weight it continues your graph.  As you can see, the fateful day I stepped on my mom's digital scale (Feb.28, 2012) and was dumbfounded that I weighed 189 pounds was when I decided to start this...and purchase a battery for my digital scale.  Today I'm 171.2, although I have been this weight for a few weeks now and need to get my butt back in gear.  My goal weight is 155 and my 'halleluiah goal weight' is 145, which is what I weighed when I got married. 

 The next screen is where you add your food and tally up your calories.  It's all nice an green when you have calories remaining, but when you eat too much, the numbers turn red and it tells you "if every day were like today, in 5 weeks you would weigh ____".  That usually just makes me really mad because I already ate too much and I don't care what I would weigh then, I just want to eat my cookie in peace."

So there it is, my little handy helper that I greatly credit for my so far success of 18 pounds gone.  And now that my digits are out there I hope to share the rest of my journey with you in an honest way.