Dieting for noobs / Feedback for myfitnesspal

kmarnes

I started my very first diet 10 days ago and have already lost 9 pounds (starting at 215 pounds, 43 years old, 6'2" male). And while that may seem impressive, it's actually not -- more in the realms of normal it seems. But I didn't know that, and started freaking out that I dropped so much weight so quickly. But apparently there is an explanation for that. Also I have a learned a crap ton of info that I'm happy to share. Remember, I have never dieted before in my entire life. I'm also a programmer, so taking a very robotic approach to this process.

First I calculated my TDEE and chose an aggressive weight loss of 1.5 pounds per week with the understanding that losing more than 2 pounds per week was unhealthy. My stats have me at 1670 calories per day.

But here are things I've learned:

• Digital food scale is a must. Fortunately we already had one.
• Hate measuring tablespoons. Such a pain. Learned a trick, where you do the measurement properly, then weigh it, and remember the weight. A tablespoon 15mL of mayonnaise weighs 20g, for example.
• Mayonnaise is a great food for those who like salty fatty foods like me. Using it in egg salad, tuna salad, salad dressing etc. But the Japanese mayo I used to use was 150 calories per tablespoon. Now I'm using Miracle Whip Lite which is only 25 calories per tablespoon!
• Once you start to feel constantly hungry in the first few days, your ability to want to ingest healthy food goes up. Blander salads, vegetable matter, low cal mayo, etc... I was eating it with a slightly feral quality.
• I started spreading out my meals. Before dieting, I would eat absolutely massive 1500+ calories meals at times, usually at lunch and not be hungry for a long time, but having 400 calories for breakfast, 400 calories for lunch was making me pretty hungry by dinner time... so I started spreading out my lunch. Eat half at noon and the other half at 2pm, and that's worked like a charm. I'm starting to do that for dinner too.. I'll have a smaller dinner and have a late night snack shortly before bed. But it's important to get a normal breakfast to set you up for the day. It's working because I am feeling full more often.
• Drinking lots of water throughout the day keeps the hunger at bay, plus it's good for you.
• Important to try to get enough carbs. I was way too low on carbs one day (lots of meat and salad), and felt like crap for it -- grumpy, irritable, slight headache. Will not repeat mistake.
• Roughly the first 10 pounds you lose is due to your body using up the body's stores of glycogen. The math science says each gram of glycogen retains 3 grams of water. So when you lose 1000 grams of glycogen, you also lose 3000 grams of water -- for a rapid weight loss total of 4kg or 8.8 pounds. That's exactly what I just experienced. Once that's depleted, then you enter slow weight loss mode. Each gram of fat retains 1 gram of water, so things slow down. I imagine when you stop dieting, the same happens in reverse.
• Salt + booze do wonders towards contributing towards sudden weight gain or not losing any weight. Salt of course naturally causes water retention. Booze also has a similar effect although it also has the bonus ability to slow down your digestion. So if skip drinking for a day, you'll drop that retained weight about 36 hours later. So knowledge is power, so now I can have a couple drinks and realize whatever weight I'm losing will be deferred for 36 hours. But I'm definitely drinking less now - so many calories! Also less concerned about salt. I like salt... so it's relative. If it stays the same, it won't fluctuate my weight up and down. The other way to look at this, is don't cutting out salt and booze is your weight fluctuation slider bar. It you cut them out of your diet, you'll rapidly drop some weight. If you choose to imbibe, you'll gain some weight. But if you keep in a calorie deficit, your weight will drop plus or minus your salt/booze level. So don't worry about this, unless of course you have health issues.
• I weigh myself every morning and record it. I want to know when I have an increase and why, so I can see the patterns.
• If you are going to eat out, try to do it for dinner. It's much harder to stay within your calorie limit if you eat out at lunch, because you'll be hungry before bedtime. But if you eat out at dinner, you'll be more satisfied considering you are in diet mode already, provided you try to be reasonable with your choices.

User experience feedback for myfitnesspal:

• The recent foods list could use major improvement. It's actually quite hard to find something you logged a day or two ago, especially if you have to browse other pages. The search text box would be a perfect opportunity to implement a auto complete filter -- for recent items. So say you start typing "cheddar". Only recent items would show up if they had the word cheddar in it. But then you could still type it out in full and hit the search button if you wanted. It would save so much time.
• Sometimes recording portions are very confusing. When I record 3 tablespoons of cream, it should say "Beatrice - Table Cream 18%, 3 tbsp", not "Beatrice - Table Cream 18%, 45ml / 1 tbsp". In fact, it would be nice if people could set a default measurement for liquids and solids, and have everything converted automatically for consistency. I have messed up teaspoons vs tablespoons on occasion.
• It would also be nice for searches to convert everything into your desired measurements. So if something is in tbsp and I want ml, please just display it in my desired unit.
• When I make a recipe, it would be nice if the food diary allowed me to expand it inline, much like a tree view, so I can see the individual components. So instead of seeing just my egg salad, I'd be able to see the component ingredients by expanding it. And say I made it without cheese, but couldn't expand and remove the one ingredient (it could compensate for the overall weight/volume) automatically.
• Quick Tools > Remember Meal would be more useful if I could choose from a popup list -- so if I have a drink with dinner, I'd like to just remember the food part of it.
• When recording my weight, I had a day with gain. Went from 207.4 to 206.2 to 207.2 to 205.8. But my diary showed that I lost 1.2 pounds, then another 1.4 pounds... but I really gained a full pound in the middle and actually lost 1.6 pounds, not 2.6 pounds. I would have expected to see -1.2 pounds, +1.0 pounds, -1.4 pounds. Sure some people don't want to display gains, so make that a setting?
• Every time someone comments on my diary, I get two emails instead of just one.
• When searching for foods to log, it would be nice if "more accurate verified" foods would show up higher in the list, plus I have no way of knowing at a glance which ones are accurate or not. There are just so many variations, the list could probably benefit from showing it's score directly, so I could just find the best one first try.

So far, this has been a very enlightening experience. Hopefully this may benefit someone. For example, the big thing was the larger weight loss in the first week of dieting that surprised me. I was worried something was wrong and I was possibly embarking on far too aggressive diet.