Greg Pack
Wash Weenie
Just thought I would share this for some of you that might need to drop a few pounds.
I have dropped a few pounds over the past few years but really decided to focus on weight loss in January this year. 2011 has been a big weight loss year for me. For the first half of the year I just made common sense adjustments to my eating and exercising. I got good results, but by mid year the weight loss has plateaued.
Back in the Summer I found a free app called "My Fitness Pal". It's basically a calorie and nutrient counter. Any time food goes in my mouth I open this app and record it. It has an online food database that has an amazing number of foods in it, including restaurant meals. It's a little clumsy at first, but it memorizes the foods you eat often, and now I can record most meals in just a few seconds. The software includes the ability to scan the barcode of products with your phone camera. A big advantage of this app over a handwritten journal is that it tracks multiple nutrients. For example, my regular eating was typically very carb heavy, and when I restricted calories I wasn't getting nearly enough protein in my diet. I think this contributed to some of my weight loss being muscle mass, not fat loss. This app allows me to closely track carb, fat, protein, sodium, fiber etc for pretty much all foods. I can tweak my eating to get the amount of protein I want daily (~150 grams) without going over my daily calorie allotment. This has required me to drastically reduce my carb intake.
You also get to "credit" calories if you exercise. So if I go out and do thirty minutes on the elliptical, I get to eat a little more that day.
You can also "friend" people, and track each others progress.
If they are honest and don't cheat, when using this app most people quickly realize that they eat far more calories than they estimated. Even though I was eating pretty healthy, when I started using this app I quickly realized I was packing in between 2500-3000 calories per day, mostly through snacking. I have since restricted my caloric intake to about 2000 calories per day and even though the loss is slow, it continues to fall at a fairly steady pace.
I've got 30 or 40 lbs to go in what I want to lose, and I've gotten the low hanging fruit, but I'm hoping to get the rest off before Spring. I have changed my lifestyle and I'm pretty confident that I will be able to maintain to a reasonable degree the weight loss I have achieved.
Anyway, If you're needing to drop some pounds I'd recommend this app. I must admit I didn't care for it at first, but now I'm obsessed with it, and it has become a crucial part of my diet/fitness regimen.
I have dropped a few pounds over the past few years but really decided to focus on weight loss in January this year. 2011 has been a big weight loss year for me. For the first half of the year I just made common sense adjustments to my eating and exercising. I got good results, but by mid year the weight loss has plateaued.
Back in the Summer I found a free app called "My Fitness Pal". It's basically a calorie and nutrient counter. Any time food goes in my mouth I open this app and record it. It has an online food database that has an amazing number of foods in it, including restaurant meals. It's a little clumsy at first, but it memorizes the foods you eat often, and now I can record most meals in just a few seconds. The software includes the ability to scan the barcode of products with your phone camera. A big advantage of this app over a handwritten journal is that it tracks multiple nutrients. For example, my regular eating was typically very carb heavy, and when I restricted calories I wasn't getting nearly enough protein in my diet. I think this contributed to some of my weight loss being muscle mass, not fat loss. This app allows me to closely track carb, fat, protein, sodium, fiber etc for pretty much all foods. I can tweak my eating to get the amount of protein I want daily (~150 grams) without going over my daily calorie allotment. This has required me to drastically reduce my carb intake.
You also get to "credit" calories if you exercise. So if I go out and do thirty minutes on the elliptical, I get to eat a little more that day.
You can also "friend" people, and track each others progress.
If they are honest and don't cheat, when using this app most people quickly realize that they eat far more calories than they estimated. Even though I was eating pretty healthy, when I started using this app I quickly realized I was packing in between 2500-3000 calories per day, mostly through snacking. I have since restricted my caloric intake to about 2000 calories per day and even though the loss is slow, it continues to fall at a fairly steady pace.
I've got 30 or 40 lbs to go in what I want to lose, and I've gotten the low hanging fruit, but I'm hoping to get the rest off before Spring. I have changed my lifestyle and I'm pretty confident that I will be able to maintain to a reasonable degree the weight loss I have achieved.
Anyway, If you're needing to drop some pounds I'd recommend this app. I must admit I didn't care for it at first, but now I'm obsessed with it, and it has become a crucial part of my diet/fitness regimen.
