Trapped in a Fat Chick: My 7 Day Commitment to Food Tracking

Why I did this

My husband and I were laying in bed discussing my up and down results over the past couple of months. At first, he said that maybe I wasn't eating enough calories. We laid there in bed trying to workout how many calories I eat in a day. After we did some math, we came to the conclusion that maybe I was actually eating too many calories in a day instead. Everything that I ate at work was pretty healthy, but when I came home, I would snack on things. Most of them were reasonably healthy like Triscuits but even reasonably healthy things can be bad for you if you eat too much of them.

In the end, he suggested that I track my food. I was totally against doing it because it's sooooooooooo annoying! I remember spending way too long on the food tracking the last time I tried using the BodyMedia device to help me lose weight. The interface was obnoxious and it just took too long. However, for the same of the blog, I can be convinced to do just about anything. If I can blog about it, I'll do some obnoxious things. Case in point, I actually finished the Denise Austin workout last Monday.

I didn't stick to a specific diet, and I didn't have a specific calorie goal in mind. I just set out to track what I was eating to find out why I wasn't losing weight.

What Happened

Surprisingly, I managed to track all of my food for an entire week. A couple of days into the experiment, I noticed that my calories were pretty low and got to thinking that maybe my husband was right. Maybe I wasn't eating enough calories. However, I then realized something else. I stopped eating appetizers with him at night and I stopped sneaking handfuls of chocolate chips after dinner. It didn't want to deal with adding food or finding food in the food log, so I just didn't eat stuff that I didn't think would be in there. This was't really what I was expecting from this test. I was hoping for an accurate account of the calories that I had been eating.

I was pleasantly surprised though that just telling myself to track my food was enough to convince myself to not eat. I wasn't hungry and I didn't feel deprived. I didn't eat much fruit last week and I had very few processed foods. I know that fruit is good for me, but it's also got a lot of fructose in it and I'm sooooooo incredibly sensitive to sugar of any kind that even nice, healthy fruit can make me feel hungry. I need to work on having protein with my fruit, but that's an experiment for another week.

There were a few days where I feel like my deficit was too big. I don't think I should reduce my calories quite that low. I felt a bit shaky one day. My head was not screwed on right. There was also a day where I felt like I had ADHD. I was standing there talking to one of my co-workers and I wasn't listening to him. My mind was going in a bazillion other directions and I just couldn't focus on anything. I eventually made him stop talking so I could look something up because I knew that if I didn't find out the answer at that point in time my head was going to explode. I wasn't listening to him anyway so he was just wasting his breath.

Oddly enough, I wasn't very hungry with this diet. The only time I've been on a "diet" and not been hungry was with Atkins. I could go most of the day on that and not eat. I had major stomach pain on that diet though. If I don't eat enough, my belly revolts. Well, my belly revolts over a lot of things, but I don't remember having any problems last week. I did a lot of whole foods and not much processed stuff at all. Now that I had a successful week, I hope that it will motivate me to stay on track. Although, I've gone three days now without an official workout. I raked on Saturday, but no workout. I didn't so anything on Sunday other than sit on my couch. My BodyMedia screen shot looks like someone flat lining. I slept horribly last night and didn't have any energy at all for a workout this morning. I have now decided that this week will be an experiment to see how long it takes me to get back on track with my diet and exercise.

The Results

Weight Sunday, April 6, 2014 AM - 304 pounds

Weight Sunday, April 12, 2014 AM - 299 pounds

Total weight loss - 5 pounds

Calorie Deficit over the 7 days - 11,594

(I forgot to do body measurements and my body fat meter)

I finally went under 300 pounds again! On Saturday, I found an old pair of jeans that was one size smaller than what I've been wearing. I put them on to see how far I was from being able to zip them up. Not only did they zip up, but I was still able to breathe! I wore those pants for several hours that day. They are still a little bit snug, but I can function in them. I didn't wear them to work today, but while I was walking around at work and pulling up my pants every five minutes, I told myself that I should have worn the smaller pants!

If you believe in the 1 pound of fat equals 3,500 calories, I should have only lost 3.31 pounds, but when you consider the fact that a couple days before the 6th, I was down to 302, we can assume the difference between 302 and 304 was water weight since it came on so quickly. If we use that assumption, then I only lost 3 extra pounds, which would agree with the BodyMedia calculation of my Calorie Deficit.

Based on my experiment, I feel that the BodyMedia Link device is a pretty accurate little thing. I'm glad I have it and will continue to use it. Now, I just need to get myself to log my food every day! Once my seven day test was over, I went an entire day without logging my food. I ate a lot of junk like Doritos and chocolate chips! Getting back on track today was difficult. I still haven't logged all of my dinner though. I had a little mishap with my planned meal and ended up eating a back up dinner which wasn't the most healthy. I'll write about that later, but let's just say Doritos and cheese were involved.

BodyMedia Screen Shots

Below are my BodyMedia screen shots for the week. These are all from the phone until you get to the food at the bottom. I did discover an obnoxious aspect of the nutrition tab on the app versus the computer. I have the Link, which means I don't need to use the computer to sync my device. I can just hit upload on the app. However, if I logged food on the computer and then uploaded through the phone, the food logged on the computer was lost. This happened twice and then I just gave up using the nutrition tab on the computer. I also discovered that they really changed the nutrition tab since I had done this before. it's super easy to put the nutrition in. With that said, it's important to note that it does not have a bar code scanner like many other apps have. However, most fruits and vegetables do not come with bar codes. I want to get rid of as much prepackaged processed food as I can. Making it annoying to log prepackaged foods might be a deterrent to eating them. I do find it odd though that the thing doesn't have Jennie-O bacon, but it has McDonald's chicken nuggets. Makes you wonder who came up with the food log. Jennie-O has a big link with The Biggest Loser and The Biggest Loser has a big link with BodyMedia. One would thing that all of the nice healthy Jennie-O products would be conveniently logged, but no biggie. I will write a post about the Nutrition tab soon. I really wanted to get this post out as soon as possible and didn't want to waste time writing the nutrition tab post first.

Sunday, April 6, 2014

Saturday, April 12, 2014

My Workout - Raking pine needles

The Breakdown of what I ate

Sunday, April 6, 2014

I need to work on my Carb/Protein/Fat mix. I'm okay with the fat being higher than what they think it should be, but I'm not okay with my protein being such a small piece of the pie. I thought I was eating a lot of protein. I eat eggs for breakfast, a protein shake for a snack and I have meat at lunch and dinner. I know I need to focus more on my nutrition, but I think I'll focus on making sure to log everything and then analyzing a broader base of days.