Last week I purchased an annual subscription to Lose It! premium. I have historically used My Fitness Pal to track macros but Lose It was suggested to me as a better alternative. Whenever I have tracked what I was eating, I was always so strict, focused heavily on hitting macros as exact as possible. Looking back, those that pushed macro tracking as flexible eating never seemed to follow that advice. I recall one of the loudest proponents of “flexible eating” constantly preaching this to anyone within earshot. This is the same person that would come into work with a baggie of 7 Jelly beans in order to hit her carbs exactly. The same person was said to have gone to bed crying on occasion as they were so hungry but didn’t want to extend beyond their allotted macros. I would love for someone to explain to me how this is flexible nutrition. It sounds more like an eating disorder to me.
What I wanted to accomplish with tracking was not to be so rigid that I would be going to bed crying. I wanted to set boundaries and operate within them to achieve my goals. I did not want to get so locked into those boundaries that I lost sight of my goal of being a healthier version of me than I currently am. I used to create a day of meals and just eat that until I was so bored that I eventually went off the rails. This time around, I am intentionally changing meals during the day and week so that it feels like there is enough variety that I am not bogged down with it. I want to work on habit stacking, building good and healthy habits each week, and then adding more once I have been able to accomplish those on a regular basis.
This last week I focused on:
- Tracking all meals
- Increased protein and veggies
- Water intake
- Less caffeine
- No energy drinks
I am seeing progress on the scale, which is a relief. It is easy to get bogged down using that as the only metric for measuring success, so I am creating other goals and benchmarks to track progression. For example, this coming week, I plan to track blood pressure as well. My PCP actually asked me to do this, but despite having a device here, I just never make it a point to do it. One of the aspects of Lose It that I have enjoyed is the ability to track everything in a single location. I also found a setting that triggers an email once a week with a summary of everything that I logged. It will be extremely helpful to bring this in to my annual physical to discuss how things have been going.
I also plan on changing up snacks, focusing more on protein intake than anything else. I have for too long snacked on high fat foods and am doing better about working to reduce that. I might be one of the few adults that could happily live off of peanut butter.