Increased Dietary Restrictions

Yes, I'm making my foodie life much more complex as I go on (dare I say it) a diet. It's true. I took all the pertinent measurements, weighed myself and bit the bullet. It's time to cut my calorie intake, exercise more and drop the "married, fat and happy" weight.

My friend Dawn pointed out that since year two of happiness with John, I've gained 10 lbs per year. That's a total of 30 lbs. Too much weight for my 5'2" frame, to be sure. Not only that, but it puts me in the high risk group for diabetes and heart disease.

What to do? While nosing around Mom and Dave's cookbook shelves, I found Secrets of the Lean Plate Club by Sally Squires, health reporter for The Washington Post. It's filled with important facts such as how much protein my brain actually needs to function (46g per day), how much fat is alright, and much more. Reading just the first 100 pages of her book provided a huge wake-up call, so a week ago Monday, I began my fight against calories. I committed to losing 30 lbs in 6 months, trying to lose 1-2 lbs per week by cutting at least 500 calories from my diet each day and upping my exercise to every day, for at least an hour (instead of the 3-5 times a week I'd been averaging).

One of the first and most important pieces of advice Ms. Squires gives is to keep a food journal. I found one online that I liked, my-calorie-counter.com, and plunked down my $25 for 6 months of a premium membership (allows users to make custom entries in the food journal). I've been using it every day, mostly adding custom entries for the items I've been eating. For each entry, the software instantly calculates where I am in terms of calories, protein, sugar, fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium and carbohydrates.It's just up to me to measure my food and make sure that my servings are true servings and that I don't go over my self-assigned targets.

So, for example, here's how my day went (foodwise) on Tuesday, 17 July:

In the image at the beginning of this post, you can see my targets for my dietary intake. Here, you can see my actual intake and how I score against those targets (scroll down to the bottom of the image to the left). Items in blue are within the targets, while those in red show where I've topped out.

With this diet, I'm also drinking more water, taking my vitamins more religiously and exercising more deliberately. The Calorie Counter part of the journal also calculates the calories you burn when doing various exercises, like using the elliptical trainer, lifting free weights and/or hiking. Yesterday, for example, I ran a calorie deficit, but not on purpose. John and I hiked for two hours, and the calories I'd eaten for the day didn't add up to as much as I'd burned. So, I ate 3 oz of shrimp and a cup of cooked, plain, whole wheat pasta to balance things out a bit.

The biggest challenge will be to apply low-fat alterations to some pretty high fat recipes I enjoy. However, the site also has a bulletin board and a very active community of users who share recipes and their results. One person gave a great tip about using yogurt instead of butter in cakes. I'm going to try that later and post the results here when the cake is done.

Each week, I'll weigh and measure myself before entering my numbers in the journal. The reason for this is to track my progress along with the calories. It's a little work, but I'll bet you I'll be seeing the rewards soon enough.

Wish me luck!