Advice for newbies

maggiepz

Tracking EVERYTHING you eat is a MUST if you are trying to lose weight or eat healthy.

Honestly I've given up lots of stuff I'd routinely eat after using MFP. I used to complain that I didn't know why I was gaining weight until I looked at the calorie counts. MFP has such a great data base. In the beginning, and sometimes still, it's just shocking.

At one restaurant we used to go to I would occasionally have a piece of their chocolate cake. Must be the BEST chocolate cake EVER. I found out that a single piece of that darn cake was 800 calories! I was absolutely stunned. On top of eating a full restaurant meal I was adding an additional 800 calories? Even if I may have eaten just one meal that day, that one meal was more calories than I should be eating in an entire day!

I also routinely would get 2 breakfast burritos from McDonalds on my way to work or a couple of simple sausage biscuits. The biscuits are 430 calories each. Just ONE of those small burritos is 300 calories. add the hash browns, another 150 calories. I'm not singling out McDs, they are pretty much all that bad.

Once you start logging everything you eat it will be crystal clear why you have put on weight or your cholesterol has sky rocketed or you are suddenly hypertensive.

I can still be surprised. Several times a week I get a cheese omelet from the cafeteria at work. I considered it a reasonable amount of calories. Yesterday I noticed that they sure seem to use a lot of oil and I wasn't counting that. Come to find out that what looks like 1/4 cup of canola oil they are using is 482 calories! Now the "guess-timate" on that "reasonable" omelet is suddenly 857 calories!