Hi all:

jdayer

I'm new to MyFitnessPal and so far I like it. I hope I can learn a bit. Heres a little about my fitness history.

I used to work out a lot and I watched what I ate. I got married and I became busy in my career so my workouts dropped and then my oldest son died. I went up to 300lbs. (6'2" male) I couldn't lose weight and yeah, I know all the stuff I used to blather on about like "it ain't hard, energy in versus energy out".

For six months I reduced my caloric intake to under 2000 calories a day and I started working out about an hour and a half a day, 30-45 minutes on a bicycle and 45-60 minutes with weights. My bench climbed back up to 315, but, I did not lose a single pound. Anyone who has done that knows how hard that kind of workout and diet regimne can be. I went back to just playing around occasionally and just normally watching what I eat. Again, no weight change.

About two years after that I started taking phosphatidylserine (PS) and I dropped 30lbs in less than a month. I have kept that off and lost another ten pounds. Now I fluctuate between 250 and 260. No other change in diet.

PS isn't some kind of miracle, its just a chemical your body makes and like any supplement if your system is out of balance it can help so don't go looking for a miracle weight loss cure.

As crazy as this sounds my intake and my activity levels don't seem to influence my weight much at all. Right now I work out a couple days a week for about 1.5hours a day including about an hour on an exercise bike (13-14 miles). I average about 2400 calories a day. If I use an MET of .9 and a standard of 3.5ml/m a person weighing 230 pounds needs about 2400 calories per 24 hours. If my activity for the 16 hours I am not sleeping exceeds an MET of .9, say, averaging 1.2 or 1.3, I should lose weight. If I include workouts.....yet my weight stays the same. The fluctuation in weight seems to be mostly water retention.

Fitness Pal suggests a caloric intake of around 2,000 which makes sense. A pound is about 4,000 calories so if minimum activity requirement for my goal weight is 2400 calories then 2,000 calories a day should get me there in about 150 days at which point I would go back up to a 2400 calorie a day diet. Yeah, been here, done this :-)

Just to make this more interesting, I have a heart condition. The other day I wore my Garmin 410 for 13.5 hours and it reported that I burned over 6,000 calories. On a different day I wore it for about 4 hours and I burned over a thousand calories just doing normal household stuff. No way right?

Anyway, after dealing with this for about ten years and keeping records in different ways including a note book in my back pocket and SuperTracker.gov I am trying out MyFitnessPal and so far I like the record keeping. We shall see how it works out. The only negatives I have seen so far are that the site doesn't have a way to interact with my Garmin and they don't allow me to enter in grams of food rather than servings. Other than that it seems to be a good way to keep fitness records. I don't expect anything is going to change, this is just a place I will keep track of what I eat and what I do.

Hope my experience is useful to others and that I can learn something.