Well, to be honest with... me?

I have been using MyFitnessPal.com since early February of this year - in fact, today is my 96th consecutive day of tracking both food and exercise. By logging every day, and usually staying within my suggested caloric range, and by doing yoga and walking, I've managed to drop 28 pounds, in around 14 weeks - something that I previously thought impossible.

I’m one of those people who said to myself, literally thousands of times over the years, “I’ll start dieting on Monday.” But Monday would come and go and I’d never start the actual process of trying to lose weight. I never had a plan, but I was somehow certain that I would drop the extra weight! Does this craziness sound familiar? I was completely fooling myself - but I wasn't fooling anybody else. I was basically lying to myself for years! But since I started using MFP, I have now found that by being honest with myself, and by methodically tracking my eating and exercise, I am actually seeing results - far better results than I had even hoped for. But it got me thinking, how many of us live the same lie, telling ourselves over and over “I’m good, I can lose the weight, no problem.” And I ask this now because an acquaintance of mine is using a fee-based, diet program to do exactly what I’m doing on MFP (where we do it for free) - and they are not being honest with themselves by not accurately tracking what they are eating. They are living my old lie - and I wonder to what end? Yes, they log some of their food, but then they close-out their tracker for the day and continue to eat and drink, not logging the 1 litre of soda, or the large bag of chips, or the two slices of pizza, and somehow still think that “well, I've tracked what I ate for most of the day, so I can now reward myself with a few thousand calories.” They are now trapped in my old lie!!! And yet they won’t listen to my suggestion that they are maybe not being honest with themselves, and maybe they are sabotaging their own efforts by not tracking their entire food intake.

But the scale doesn't lie, right. And when they’re seeing that they have only dropped 1/10th of a pound over a two-week period, they throw a fit and seem astonished and say “How is this possible - I tracked everything?” And, of course, the scale is but one the many ways by which you mark progress when losing weight (not to mention simply feeling better, having clothes that actually fit, sleeping better, etc. - the list goes on and on). But it is frustrating to basically hear the old me, and to wonder if I was as frustrating to others when I said “Monday, I’ll start on Monday.”

Personally, I’m done lying to myself - I now know that the only way through this is to be completely honest in my tracking and to accurately note how much of any given food I've consumed, and how much I might have exercised on any given day. What is the sense in lying to me? If I go over my target, so be it – I’ll note it and MFP will track it, and I’ll be accountable to myself.

In this case, I really do think “honesty is the best policy.” What do you think?