Just signed up!

antkowiak

Hello everyone!

My ex used to track meals and workouts on this website. I had forgotten about it until I recently heard it mentioned on CNBC by Andrew Ross Sorkin, and decided it might be beneficial to me.

I think I'm in fairly good shape, and I want to maintain my fitness. I would like to gain a little bit more muscle strength (especially upper body) while losing a little fat. I'm currently 6 feet tall and weigh about 175 pounds.

I genuinely enjoy jogging and working out. I have no problems at all motivating myself to work out. The main problem is that I have a few nagging old injuries that make it difficult sometimes. From all the jogging in my life, sometimes I get "runners knee" -- just general soreness in my knees behind my kneecap.

More seriously, I had a herniated disc in my lower back about 10 years ago which compressed my sciatic nerve and caused horrible shooting pain and numbness down one of my legs. This went on for about 6 months, during which time I gained weight to my heaviest point in my life. I was up to 196 pounds. I literally could not exercise due to the pain. This depressed me immensely, and as part of the depression, I was eating more food (and unhealthy foods) to comfort me. It was a horrible downward spiral. Fortunately, after enduing about 6 months of horrible pain, I found a fantastic orthopedic surgeon who was able to remove the portion of my disc that was causing my pain. It was amazing to feel almost normal again. Things aren't exactly 100% and I sometimes get minor pains or minor pins-and-needles feelings in the areas where I used to have problems... but these issues come and go. (Usually if I over-do a workout or try to lift something a little bit heavier than I should, I will tweak my back, and it will cause a few minor issues for a while... but it comes and goes. It's nowhere near as horrible as it was pre-surgery.) Ibuprofen helps a lot.

After my back surgery, over a period of a year, I took things easy and I slowly began taking long walks, then walking fast, and then jogging. After about a year and a half of regular exercise adhering to a fairly strict diet, I was down to about 155 pounds (which admittedly, is too thin. One of my coworkers jokingly asked if I had cancer. Yikes!) I relaxed my diet a bit, but continued to exercise regularly.

Anyway, I guess I'm here to track my fitness

One of the challenges for me I've noticed early on with this site is the difficulty in knowing how big of a portion size to enter. I generally don't like to measure out my food ahead of time. I've always just put as much food onto my plate/bowl as I felt I wanted to eat. For example, this morning, I made a bowl of old-fashion oatmeal, with dried cranberries, walnuts, and soy milk. I think I used about half a cup of oatmeal... but I just sprinkled in the amount of dried cranberries and walnut pieces as "I wanted".. and then added a splash of soymilk. This obviously isn't conducive to making accurate calorie counts. However, I find it somewhat cumbersome to have to measure everything out. For someone who makes most of their meals from scratch (which is usually a lot healthier than packaged foods), this is much more time consuming to measure each individual ingredient.

I'm still playing around with the site, and I'm finding ways to "save" entire meals -- kind of like templates. I suppose this will probably become easier over time as I add some of my regular "meals" that are an aggregation of a whole bunch of ingredients.

Anyway, enough for now.