It’s hard to think of what to do with monthly challenges. There are so many areas of my life that would benefit from establishing better habits. But my health has to come at the top of the list. Last month I did exercise. This month I will be tracking my food.
Why I’m Doing This
I have a sedentary job. I sit most of the time. I also do not have a great diet. With these two things, I have gained weight steadily over the past 20 years. Not much per year, but it adds up. My doctor looked at me soberly during my last physical and reminded me that time is running out. If I lose the weight, I will be able to avoid long-term serious consequences.
Ugh.
I wish that taking weight off was as fun as putting it on.
What Hasn’t Worked
I have been struggling to lose weight for a long time. Given that my husband has the metabolism of a hummingbird and can eat whatever he wants and how ever much he wants, I learned some bad habits.
I tried Weight Watchers but could never manage all the books and looking things up. Paying for public weigh-in humiliation was counter-productive, and the program relied on highly processed foods with lots of artificial sweeteners.
Telling myself that I was “watching what I ate” wasn’t effective. Because I wouldn’t remember correctly.
I tried an application called Healthi that had all of the various WW plans on it. But they started popping up notifications for GLP-1s (the injectable weight loss drugs). With an autoimmune disease and cancer, this is not a path for me. Even when I complained to the company and we verified my settings, I would still get the popup notifications. I turned off notifications completely, and then I started receiving them through email. I finally stopped using the app and threatened to file a complaint with the FCC for continuing to email after unsubscribing. Regardless, I don’t need someone pushing drugs on me.
The Downside of Not Tracking
During January I started another round of physical therapy. The first week I was hit by a wave of exhaustion that left me unable to do much of anything. Panicking that it was a sign of something really bad, I tried to track down what could have triggered.
I told myself, I’ve been sleeping enough. Hm. Looking at my Fitbit stats, I hadn’t been getting more than 6 hours for 4 days.
I told myself that I had been eating well. Except I hadn’t tracked anything in 10 days. And I already know that my memory is faulty.
I need to track what I am eating, if for no other reason than to give me a way to rule out what I am eating as the cause of how I am feeling.
How I Am Doing This Challenge
I evaluated a bunch of different apps to help me track the food. Right now I want to focus on getting enough protein, and not overeating. So I settled on an app called LoseIt. It allows me to track food, water, sleep, activity and fasting. It’s a great app, and I paid for a lifetime subscription during one of the early “buy now”. I looked at it from the standpoint that it was less than what I had paid for 3 months of WW back in the day.
It allows manual entry, with a lot of foods and brands in the database, allows you to enter recipes, and you can even take a photo of what you are eating.
The thing with this app, though, is that I have to use it. I have been using it to log partial days (if at all) for the past three months.
My goal for this month is just to track what I am eating. That way I am not making judgements, and I can evaluate at the end of the month how I am doing, and adjust as I need to to start losing the weight.
The Reward
For my reward with this, I am going to give myself the gift of unstructured time. I will take an afternoon, find a cozy place (like the library) and allow myself to read uninterrupted for a few hours.
In Conclusion
Embarking on this month‑long food‑tracking challenge is a powerful step toward reclaiming control over my health, and recording everything I eat will give me the clarity I need to identify patterns, adjust portions, and ultimately move toward sustainable weight loss. B
