I was fretting about my expanding waistline a few weeks ago when I happened to pass a bulletin board at the gym promoting the YMCA Lose It Challenge. Drop 10 pounds in two months by tracking your meals and exercise using the online application, Lose It. Normally, I don't like to micromanage my food consumption, but since this year has special circumstances attached to it, I need to start paying a little more attention if I don't want to gain those 30 pounds we talked about. Might as well make it fun, right? I signed up right away.
Based on my age, height, and current weight, Lose It calculated my recommended daily calorie intake, then revised it downward based on a 2-month, 10-pound weight loss goal. My job, it explained, is simply to document and input my meals and exercise each day, and try to keep my calories under that magic number. Easy peasy. I can do this!
A database within the application stores the calorie amounts for almost every food you can think of, from raw ingredients to several brands of frozen meals and fast food. So far I haven't been able to stump it, even with random entries like persimmons. I usually break out the individual ingredients for homemade meals, but, if I'm feeling lazy, I might sub in an equivalent meal from one of the restaurants they have on file.
Then there's exercise. Calorie-burning values have been assigned for all kinds of physical activities, including swimming, running, aerobics, yoga, walking, sit-ups, push-ups, canoeing, darts, Wii bowling, house-cleaning, snow-shoveling, luge (!) and, yes, even sex. I checked. Three different levels of sexual activity, in fact, from passive, light kissing to active, vigorous humping. Unfortunately, the values are much lower than one would hope. For example, if I wanted to burn 150 calories (the equivalent of 45 minutes of slow-moving tai chi), the Lose It number-crunchers estimate that would require active, vigorous sex for no less than 4 hours and 30 minutes. Poor Husband!
Anyway, I take a kind of perverse pleasure in accurately documenting my food and exercise down to the amount of cookie dough I ate out of the bowl and anything that might possibly count as physical activity. Calories burned are automatically subtracted from calories consumed, and then the number is compared to my target calorie intake. I particularly enjoy the custom graphs they provide so I can see the results in painful relief. Here's how I did last week:
The red is where I exceeded my calorie count. It's pretty obvious which days I was making desserts. My favorite is last Monday where I took my calorie count and tried to double it. Take that, Lose It, you're not the boss of me! I hope I really enjoyed whatever baked goods I was tunneling my way through that day.
So, yeah, not as easy as I thought with my crazy new dessert-packed lifestyle. I haven't lost any weight over these past three weeks, and the date by which I'm projected to meet my goal keeps getting automatically recalculated further and further into the future, but it should be noted that I haven't gained any weight, either. And, honestly, if that's all I accomplish, it will have been worth it.
I used Lose It successfully to lose the weight I put on when I started a desk job. I would certainly count not gaining weight while writing a desert cookbook a success as well. I think merely keeping track of what you're eating and learning how many calories are in which things is a huge help. Best of luck with the rest of the cookbook!
Posted by: Melch | January 23, 2012 at 12:22 AM
Holy hamburger, what an awesome program/website! My husband and I decided to get a better idea of exactly what we were eating and the calorie count of it last year and I wish we'd had this site then. Certainly a lot easier than our method of typing it all into a spreadsheet every day and also not having the activity level factored in. Today would have put me all in the red zone and probably had the calorie police at my door, we had biscuits, sausage and gravy for breakfast. Thanks for posting about it AND for making me laugh at "active, vigorous humping"!
Posted by: April was in CT now CA | January 23, 2012 at 12:47 AM
Three days tracking on Lose It! Thanks for the link. I'm not writing a dessert cookbook, but I have my challenges ;-) Brenda
Posted by: Brenda | January 25, 2012 at 11:40 PM
Loved your post Tammy! I did Fit Day last year which does the same thing. It was good for making me aware of what I was eating. Like, did I want to eat one Funny Bone or two! Sadly I would eat only one to make me feel less guilty. The sex thing always cracked me up I thought it was at least a thousand calories! I was shocked at how low it was! Keep up the good work, being aware is what helps. Can't wait for your cookbook!
Posted by: giovanna | February 09, 2012 at 09:59 AM