I've been making an attempt to eat better. Not so much for weight loss purposes, though if 5 or 10 pounds came off in the process I wouldn't complain. But although I have a lot of healthy habits (lots of water, no soda, very little meat, no candy or other sugary snack foods), I have a weakness for anything made with fat and salt (I think I singlehandedly ate an entire pan of potato latkas at Ebony's Christmas party this weekend!). My life is pretty stressful, and I'm often tired more than I should be, so I decided I needed to make some lifestyle changes--the type I can live with forever, not just a short term crash diet. I did pretty well the last few weeks, mostly because I've been barricaded in my apartment studying. When you're by yourself and don't leave the house it's easier to eat well. But put me in a social situation and I lose my head (well, the ability to quit stuffing things into my head at any rate.)
To help me on my quest, I bought some really cool software from calorieking.com. The website has nutrition information for just about every food imaginable, including a lot of restaurants where it would be difficult to get the information otherwise. With the software, you fill in your personal information, and tell it whether your goal is to lose, maintain, or gain (ha!) and it calculates how many calories you need and helps you keep track of everything you eat and how much you exercise. It tallies your totals over the week and tells you what would happen if you contined at the same rate. I realized perhaps I was missing the point of eating healthier (and spending money on software to do so) when I looked at my information from over the weekend:
You've recorded 2177 calories on this day (subtracting 457 calories burned through exercise from 2634 calories eaten). Your target was 1279 calories. On an average person, these figures would lead to a gain of 3.9 pounds over the next month.
I especially love how all the important (and most depressing) parts are conveniently in bold for my reading ease.
