Diet Post-Mortem
So, followers of the Exciting Life of Marie will know that I was on my first ever "diet" this year, trying to lose weight to win a rebate on my elliptical machine. They had an offer where you got a rebate if you lost a certain percentage of your body weight in a certain time, and I thought "Well, I could stand to lose some weight" and I did it.
This weekend I went in for my weigh-in and beat the goal weight by five pounds, with much ego-stroking by the sales guy, who also bought a Fusion bracelet from me. :)
Now for some charts and a little discussion of What We Learned from this little experiment!
So, what I did was track my food intake using the FDA's "supertracker" - https://www.choosemyplate.gov/SuperTracker/Home
I set myself a goal of staying below their recommended daily allowances for total calories and for "empty calories", which it would track automatically from the foods I inputted.
What I found was that I have no trouble whatsoever staying below a 2,000 calorie diet. (For some reason it started me out at 2,200 and then dropped it to 2,000. Because I weighed less?) I only exceeded intake four times since I started in January, and one of those was Super Bowl Sunday, and another I think is a mistake because I recorded my lunchtime ramen as 700 calories of Pho. (It was a Pho-style Vietnamese Ramen, but yeah, I don't think it was four cups worth, really. One of the things I had to learn for this food tracking thing was how to estimate volumes of my portions - and at the beginning I had a rather dim view of what a cup was.)
Total Calories:
Rather, my biggest problem was staying under the 268 "empty" calories per day. One donut or a cola could take more than half of that! Also I found that foods I thought were healthy - cheese and eggs and milk - registered as full of empty calories. (Again note the spike for Superbowl Sunday.) While I was consistently under my "total" calories, I was more often than not over my "empty" total - in fact, I stopped caring at all about total calories on like day 3 and only focused on getting the empty calories lower.
Empty Calories:
Overall, I learned a lot about what calorie-ladden foods I can do without (cola, yogurt) and which ones are just worth it (donuts, cheese). Though I'm 'ending' my diet now, having reached my goal weight, I'm sure this will have a lasting affect on my food choices. I know a lot more now about what I can and can't eat, since I had to try to find non-empty-calorie foods that wouldn't upset my Crohn's.
This weekend I went in for my weigh-in and beat the goal weight by five pounds, with much ego-stroking by the sales guy, who also bought a Fusion bracelet from me. :)
Now for some charts and a little discussion of What We Learned from this little experiment!
So, what I did was track my food intake using the FDA's "supertracker" - https://www.choosemyplate.gov/SuperTracker/Home
I set myself a goal of staying below their recommended daily allowances for total calories and for "empty calories", which it would track automatically from the foods I inputted.
What I found was that I have no trouble whatsoever staying below a 2,000 calorie diet. (For some reason it started me out at 2,200 and then dropped it to 2,000. Because I weighed less?) I only exceeded intake four times since I started in January, and one of those was Super Bowl Sunday, and another I think is a mistake because I recorded my lunchtime ramen as 700 calories of Pho. (It was a Pho-style Vietnamese Ramen, but yeah, I don't think it was four cups worth, really. One of the things I had to learn for this food tracking thing was how to estimate volumes of my portions - and at the beginning I had a rather dim view of what a cup was.)
Total Calories:
Rather, my biggest problem was staying under the 268 "empty" calories per day. One donut or a cola could take more than half of that! Also I found that foods I thought were healthy - cheese and eggs and milk - registered as full of empty calories. (Again note the spike for Superbowl Sunday.) While I was consistently under my "total" calories, I was more often than not over my "empty" total - in fact, I stopped caring at all about total calories on like day 3 and only focused on getting the empty calories lower.
Empty Calories:
Overall, I learned a lot about what calorie-ladden foods I can do without (cola, yogurt) and which ones are just worth it (donuts, cheese). Though I'm 'ending' my diet now, having reached my goal weight, I'm sure this will have a lasting affect on my food choices. I know a lot more now about what I can and can't eat, since I had to try to find non-empty-calorie foods that wouldn't upset my Crohn's.