Here to track sodium intake as a diagnostic tool

I've had hearing loss and tinnitus in on ear for years. My ENT doc mostly ruled out a tumor as the cause and was just calling it atypical (since it is one ear only) hearing loss. But I recently I've added vertigo. I have an appointment with the ENT doc at the end of October. In the mean time, I've been ordered to keep my sodium intake between 1000 & 1500 mg/day and need a tracking tool - which is how I ended up here. If it decreases the vertigo, it may be endolymphatic hydrops (which includes Meniere's disease).

Both good and bad timing. I had just decided to get serious about weight loss again after letting my weight creep back up in the last year. Calorie counting doesn't work for me since I grow bored with counting once I've lost the weight and the weight comes back fairly quickly. I also tend to treat the calorie cap as permitting me to eat anything so long as I don't exceed the calories for the day - not a healthy lifetime plan. The success I've had in recent years (when I've been skinny much more of the time than I've been fat) is to modify what I eat and not pay any attention at all to calories. I eat two normal servings of lean protein daily, as many fruits and vegetables as I want, cut out or minimize sugar and fats, and in the losing phase I eat two empty but filling high volume carbs (like a bag of low calorie kettle corn, or a bunch of rice cakes). Once I hit my target, I substitute denser carbs (whole grain breads, for example), which tend to require more calories to fill me - which I need for maintenance anyway. I've done enough calorie counting to come within 10% of the calories for the day - but I never actually count - and that change in how I eat has kept me skinny around 7 of the last 10 years.

So - the timing is good, because paying attention daily helps (although I've never tracked anything but exercise - I'm up to 64.6 miles in the pool so far this year !) But the timing is bad because I know from experience that counting calories (or anything else - like points or some substitute for calories) is not a useful tool for me. By default the calorie counter is displayed with my food diary - so I'm wrestling with whether to leave it displayed or not.

And, also bad timing because I am discovering that many of my empty carbs are high in sodium (the flavor of rice cakes I like have 735 mg for the quantity I eat in one sitting, and sometimes I have that quantity twice in a day). So that is a bummer and I will have to figure out how to adjust so I don't sabotage myself on the weight loss end while I am monitoring my sodium.

I guess one benefit of the timing is that because of getting the sodium out of my system I'm dumping water pretty quickly - so going from 172.2 lbs at my doctor's visit on 9/26 to 167.6 lbs 3 days later feels like a lot of progress (even though I know it is just that I'm dumping retained water).