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!

Now, I have never binged and purged, so I didn’t think think this was an issue for me, but I found the show oddly compelling. I thought I would feel revolted, and certainly it wasn’t pretty, but I ended up mostly feeling sad about the shame and lies and pain and anger and hopelessness this was causing everyone. This young lady had given up her future for immediate food in front of her. Her loving parents were ready to give her up to make the cycle of disappointed hope and broken promises stop. My main sense was, “What a tragic waste!”

But, at the same time, I felt afraid, exposed somehow. I have never wolfed down such enormous quantities of food in quite the same unstoppable way she did — but, I recognized a kindred spirit, and I didn’t like it! I suddenly remembered episodes in my life. I remembered laying in bed as a teen, waiting for the family to fall asleep so I could sneak out to the kitchen for the rest of the cheesecake. (As I tiptoed down the hall, I found my mom and sisters already at the kitchen table finishing it all. Talk about dysfunctional!) I remember as a young mom, buying six pastry cream horns to share with my family, then cramming 3 of them in my mouth, ferociously, one after the other, one the way home in the car in the dark, then sneaking the evidence in secetly, wondering how to hide it to disguise my shame – and to keep the rest for myself later. I remember once after all my babies were older, losing weight very well for quite a while, getting my weight down into the ‘normal’ range, and feeling invincible — until on our way home from a special weekend away that meant a lot to me, my husband off-handedly said and did some things that brought up all my old issues in our marriage, and something in me decided it was all no use. I didn’t say anything to him, but when I walked into the house, I dove vengefully into pie and ice cream, and never looked back until I’d regained all the weight and then some.

So, although I could look at that woman on TV and tell myself I am not like that, I could also see that, yes, I am someone whose heart could race and hand could tremble at the thought of hiding in secret to devour the world. Yes, I am someone whose life and health and self-respect and loved ones have paid a price because of my food issues. Yes, I am someone who could go there, little by little, choice by choice. Thank God, I have not acted on many of those impulses — but, the possibility exists, the siren song is there somewhere in the back of my mind.

This whole process, to me, ceased to be just about a number on a scale or a size hanging in my closet. This is my journey toward wholeness, and away from being crippled and damaged and not quite good enough and always afraid that the world would suddenly come crashing down on me if I didn’t keep holding everything together. This is my personal quest for peace and freedom, for transparency and honesty and integrity, within myself and toward God. This is me learning the amazingness of grace – giving up my own white-knuckled efforts at running my universe with perfection, learning to be comfortable with my failings and unimpressed with my achievements, coming to terms with life as it is, learning to trust.

Will I ever binge again? I don’t know. I hope not. But I won’t binge forever, alone and lost and ashamed. I’m not hiding anymore.

I am only halfway to my goal, so I still have half my weight loss journey yet to go, but I know I will make it. The past 50 lbs. of loss seemed hard-fought and hard-won at times, and some days were a battle. Yet, looking back over these past months of losing weight, it seems the time has flown. It was worth every moment of effort to slip on and easily zip up the slacks that were packed away in my “Too Small” box just last month. Sweet victory!