The Scale and Pie Graphs

The scale finally moved a smidge down to 220.5 ~ It has been creeping up to 221.8-222 so thank goodness it seems to be going in the right direction now. It could just be today though, who knows. At least it is encouraging.. and now I won't weigh myself again until Thursday for my weekly weigh in. I also think I might start doing weekly videos... not sure though. I just feel like I forget so much by the time I hit my month mark... maybe I would be able to share more along the way by doing weekly videos. :)

As I mentioned in my last video, I went ahead and started tracking my food again for the past few days. I downloaded two apps to my iPhone - SparkPeople and DailyBurn. I also checked out their website versions. I used to use SparkPeople for quite a while after I moved out here and started a weight loss program, and it had worked really well for me, so I assumed I would use that one. However with my current eating habits of eating 6 small meals a day, it doesn't really work for me anymore. It does allow you to add custom meals, but not put them in any order you want. So when I look at my page for the day, it says "Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Snack, Breakfast #2, Lunch #2, Dinner #2. While this can certainly work, and it doesn't affect your calorie total at the end of the day... it just isn't convenient for me.

On DailyBurn, it is set up like this. "Breakfast, Morning Snack, Lunch, Afternoon Snack, Dinner, Evening Snack." This works perfectly for me. It also has two of the features I used to enjoy on SparkPeople - a tracker for glasses of water, and a pie graph of your daily calorie intake that shows you your percentages of fat, protein and carbs for the day. The downside, however, is that these two features are on the website but NOT the iPhone app. Not a HUGE deal, because I am on my computer a lot every day. But if I were away from home, it would be nice to have those on the app. Of course, I can use the web on my phone too and log into the site that way, so I guess it's not a huge deal.

Other things I like about Daily Burn... the food database has been great so far... many foods have pictures, and when you look at your day you can see what you've eaten in pictures. When you add a new food yourself, or your own recipe, you can upload a picture of your own, too. There is also an additional app which costs $2.99 (the regular daily burn app is free) called FoodScanner. You can add this on, and it allows you to scan the bar code on any packaged food, and it will bring up the nutrition info if the food is in their database. So far I haven't encountered a food that was not in their database. If you do, again you can add it yourself including the bar code number, then it will show up for other people who search for it.

I've decided to stick with Daily Burn. It works well for me. I have no idea if I will track ALL the time or not. It might be something I do just when I'm going through rough patches like this plateau, or maybe do 1 week a month so I can check in with myself... we shall see. For now I'll just do it til I don't feel like doing it anymore.

I've already learned something important, which is I wasn't staying as low-carb as I had been in the past. The pie graph really helped me out with that. Yesterday I cut back to less carbs, more protein, and the scale dropped today. Most likely NOT a coincidence, since I haven't changed anything else. Same amount of exercise, same calorie range, still on my period. But it's the first time in a week that the scale went down. So I think I'm on to something here.

I thought since I was surpassing my protein requirements (getting over 100g per day) that it was okay to have a few more carbs. But that obviously was slowing things down. Maybe I'm jumping the gun here, though... one day isn't enough to know for sure. I'll have more to say at my weekly weigh in on Thurs. I'm going to stay low carb and see if things get moving again :)