The thing no one (and I mean, no one) wants to do.

October 28, 2012

58.9 pounds to go

I better get away before she starts lecturing me.

I have had this conversation more times than I can count over the last 5 months.  As I've mentioned many many times in my blogs I count every calorie I eat and log it into an application called "MyFitnessPal" on my iPhone.  It is the easiest thing I've ever used - I can scan barcodes off food and it automatically logs them in.  I can look up a restaurant and the healthiest things on the menu come up first with their corresponding calories.  I can look up beers by brand and gawk at the caloric price I will have to pay.  If I'm going out for sushi I can look up "Rainbow Roll" and see if it's in my food budget.  When I first started incorporating this into my life I spend a lot of time on my couch looking up my favorite foods and realizing how little of it I could afford.  It was the class I had been longing to take for so many years to truly realize what it means to "pick the healthy choice."  Here is an app, here is the food, here is how much it costs. Here is the breakdown of how much of each food group you need every day.  Here is the tracking for how much weight you've lost.  Here is where you can enter your exercise.  Here are your friends who can say how awesome you're doing.  And here is how you're trending for the week.

 

I don't know why there is so much stigma attached to the word "calorie" and (godforbid) tracking it.  Before the invention of iPhones it was different because you needed to carry around a physical diary and food dictionary which screams "this bitch is on a diet, watch out she's going to lecture you!" I personally was always resistant to tracking my food.  Every time a dietician or friend would tell me to track what I ate I dug in my heels and said to myself "no fucking way."  There was a wall there and I was not going to climb it.  The diary seemed silly, it seemed stupid and most of all embarrassing.  I didn't want anyone to ever catch me with a retarded food log because I didn't want them to know that I couldn't figure out how to feed myself without it.  That I didn't have any education or control over what I put in my mouth.  That being healthy didn't come naturally to me.  Because once I started tracking and people started noticing, the truth was bound to come out.

The great thing about the app on my phone is that no one has to know.  Everyone is obsessed with their phones and constantly fiddling with them, so taking a few minutes at dinner to figure out the calories is easy to hide.

Holy shit, potato salad has 358 calories a cup?  The humanity!

Once I started getting used to logging everything I was kicking myself for never doing this before.  How could I have ever expected a crash diet to work when I wasn't thinking about what was going in my mouth?  I was still trapped in the "I want to eat as much as I want whenever I want" mindset so I was prepared to try any crash program in order to achieve it without using that goddamn tracker.  Slowly, I realized that this is so in tune to how I function as a human.  I am an extremely analytical person so dividing my food intake into caloric chunks (300 for breakfast, under 450 for lunch and the rest for dinner) became so easy.  It's like being able to analyze my own marketing, media buy and tracking analytics (what I do for a living) on my own body.  I do this with every other aspect of my life, why not apply it to a healthy lifestyle?  As it got to be more second nature to log my food I found myself referring to my diary a lot because by the time dinner rolled around I had already forgotten what I ate for breakfast.  When I wasn't tracking my food it was so easy to say "did I have one egg or two for breakfast?  Hmmm, just one I'm pretty sure.  I'm going to go for the cake."  When in reality I ate three eggs and was experiencing some serious denial.

And like any big change in my life, I won't be ready until I'm ready.  It's the same thing with the people around me.  Circling back to the cartoon in the opening of this entry, I can feel the "no fucking way" emanating off the people who learn that I'm logging my food.  If they are that resistant then nothing I say is going to get them to change their mind.  The next part of the conversation normally is a long justification as to why they eat the things they eat and whatever crash diet they anticipate trying.  Here's the thing when this conversation happens: I'm doing this for me, it is not a reflection or judgment on the people around me and their choices with food.  They can do whatever they want and I will love them just the same.  I am simply giving information as to the tools that work for me.  Oftentimes if I say, "believe me, I felt just like you about the food logging," it helps take the edge off a little.  (plus, it's true.)

The funny thing is I have now become "the influencer" on my family with the food diary.  The conversation from the beginning of this entry is now happening almost every day because I've reached a point where my weight loss is noticable.  It took me five months to get here and it's probably going to take me another year to get to my goal.  Now that others can see the results they want to get on the wagon too, which is great!  However, I won't deny it's a little unnerving when my whole family is asking how many calories are in my sandwich or what my caloric goal is for the day.  A.K.A  this is no longer a private journey. (Just don't start judging my sandwich or tell me what I should eat instead or I'm gonna smack ya!)  I feel touched and honored that they want to contribute to changing our ways and support me.  Having more positive support is one of the healthiest things I can have, so please feel free to friend me on MyFitnessPal: bonniehorvitz, and we can keep going on this path together.