As many of my readers already know, I have a fitbit and absolutely love it. You also may know by now that I have struggled with my post-baby body, and despite working out and trying to eat well, I can’t seem to lose any weight. I made the commitment that before my partner and I could have another baby, I needed to get down to at least 120 pounds, if not 115. Or at least, pounds aside, my baby belly needed to go. So as Monster neared the 1 year mark, I started thinking more seriously about weight loss.
My fitbit, which I am completely addicted to, has a lot more features than just the ability to count my steps. One of the things I can do with the app on my phone is monitor my food and water intake. I had done this briefly in the past, but it was a lot of work to maintain so I had given it up. However, I was messing around on the app recently and learned there is a new bar-code feature, where I can scan the food that I am eating and it will calculate all the information about it that I need. This made things way easier.
Out of curiosity more than anything, I started entering my food. I set a weight loss goal of only a few pounds and put the indicator bar on easy, meaning if I wanted to lose weight through food, I would need to eat 500 less calories per day.
I’m not big on limiting food intake, and honestly I didn’t really keep the calorie limit in mind. I think when you are restricting calories just to lose weight, you will inevitably gain it back when you start eating the same amount of food as you did before the restriction. For me, the calorie counting was not about restriction, and really couldn’t be (breastfeeding). It was more about awareness.
As I entered each of the food items I ate in a single day into my phone, I started to become more aware of what I was eating and how often. Those 20 Easter Reese’s Eggs that I ate over a three day span? Yeah, those showed up in my caloric intake. I found that instead of eating less food, I wanted to be intentional about what food I was eating. If I was really high on calories for one day, maybe I would skip dessert. Or if I went to enter food and realized I had eaten just an hour before, I tried drinking a glass of water first, in case I was actually just thirsty.
The other nice thing about tracking my food was the tracking of macro-nutrients. The fitbit app broke down what percentage of my foods were a certain nutrient. This breakdown over time was helpful for me to see my eating patterns. And if I was insatiably hungry in a day, viewing this could give me an idea if I was missing protein, carbs, or something else.
I don’t know how much time I have spent trying to lose weight since Monster’s birth. I can say I gave it a good two months hard work at the gym and my weight fluctuated anywhere between 140 and 145 pounds. After a few weeks of counting calories, my weight dropped down to 138.5, which it hadn’t been since shortly after giving birth to Monster, when my full time job was breastfeeding. I understand how a lot of calorie counting can go wrong, and it probably doesn’t work for everyone. If you are struggling to lose weight though, and you need a bit of a picture around your eating habits for a bit, I would really encourage giving this a try.
Interesting that you wrote about this subject this week, as I have recently started gaining weight and couldn’t figure out why. Reading this made me realize I have been doing a lot of mindless eating at work the past couple weeks. Food comes in, and we are allowed to open it to see if it’s fresh, or chocolate has melted and rehardened. I especially liked your comment about the candy eggs. It was my aha moment.