Reality Check!

If you haven’t already done so, I HIGHLY recommend that you set up an account with fitday.com – a free online program, and so helpful in many areas, like calculating food intake, charting weight loss, recording exercise, providing a journal, etc. It is frankly a real pain to get started and figure out the first week or so, but becomes much easier after that. I find it is indispensable to keep me accountable and show me my blind spots.

Next, you’ll want to actually weigh and measure portions, not just guess. Most of the time, our estimates are quite a bit off, and that can really slow our losses. (Let’s face it – if we knew what a proper serving size was, we probably wouldn’t be in this shape, now would we? Speaking for myself, I obviously can’t be trusted to know when enough is enough, left to my own devices! I need an objective measure.)

WalMart, Target, and places like that carry cheap kitchen scales in their housewares departments. Yours doesn’t even need to be digital – a simple mechanical kitchen scale for $10 or so will do the job just fine. You’ll also need a set of measuring cups and spoons, which you probably already have.

Generally speaking , you will weigh meats with the scale and measure veggies and liquids with the cups and spoons. For liquids, 4 fl. oz. = 1/2 cup, but NOT for solids! For example, 4 oz by weight of vegetables can be 1 – 2 cups easily, not 1/2 cup. You will need to use a measuring cup to measure your salad veggies and cooked veggies, NOT a scale. Otherwise, you could inadvertently go WAY over on your carb counts, and stall or even reverse your losses!

The first tricky hurdle is finding the right food description. Fitday often gives you many choices, like with bone or without, with skin or without, cooked in various ways, etc. Then it sometimes say NS, which means Not Specified, for which they use an average, I guess. So I try to be as accurate as I can. (I’d rather weigh my chicken in ounces, for example, than to say “breast, large”. Too vague; too much margin for error.)

The next hurdle is entering the right quantity. Fitday has these default quantities that seem really bizarre to me, like ounces for wine but cups for olive oil. So, first I enter all the correct foods, remembering even a tsp of butter on my veggies or a tablespoon of half and half in my coffee. Once I get my description entered, then I go back and adjust quantities, like 1 Tbs instead of 1 cup, or 2 eggs instead of 1. For fractions, I use decimal form. like .5 for 1/2. I also learned the hard way to click on “Save Changes”!

You can even use FitDay to plan out your day’s menu. That way you can see if it will work without putting you over your limits. If not, you can readjust before you eat it, instead of being blindsided after the fact. Personally, I’m often surprised by the difference between what I THINK something will total out to be, and what it really is. Sometimes my guesses were over, but usually I grossly underestimate carbs and calories if I don’t weigh. measure, and enter faithfully. I’ve also learned that making LITTLE changes often makes a BIG difference in outcome!

Calorieking.com and dietfacts.com are both good places to look up foods that aren’t prepopulated into Fitday’s data bank. Dietfacts has lots of restaurant food, too, and even has a feature that will let you import a result directly into Fitday with a click, if you have both open at once.

It was a pain at first, but by now I have many of my regular foods remembered, or set up as a Custom Food. I also use Fitday to record my weight and exercise, and I use the journal to post my menus and/or my struggles and successes. It has become a necessity to me!