500-day streak: What I learned, why I'm quitting, and the best meal recipe

RyanTahiti · August 2015

Well friends, I guess this is goodbye. I completed my 500th day in a row of logging every calorie in and out of my body - food, drink, and exercise. I ran a marathon and rocked it. My lifestyle has changed and I now feel in tune with my body. So this bird is leaving the nest. Thanks, MyFitnessPal, for teaching me to fly.

I also posted the best (aka most effective) recipe I've found here: http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10237388/

Some of the things I learned:

1. The second week is the hardest. Keep with it.

2. Accountability, Sustainability, and Consistency are the three keys to an effective lifestyle change.

3. Log that food. No matter what. Log every calorie you intake.

4. Round up for calories in, round down for calories burned.

5. If you cheat, you're only cheating yourself. And who are you doing this for, anyway?

6. MFP overestimates my "Default Goal" for net calories by 25.8%. That's a lot.

7. Everyone has a kryptonite. What's yours? Recognize it, and get it out of sight. Ask your spouse / roommate / cat / whomever to get it out of the house. Mine is chocolate chip cookies - and I have no power over them. You're strong, but we all only have so much willpower. Just make it unavailable.

8. Listen to your body, and learn from what it's telling you. When you wake up in the morning, you can feel exactly how well you did yesterday.

9. Only weigh once a week. Same day and time of day, and consistently check in with that. Look for long week-to-week trends instead of instantaneous judgments.

10. "How do I feel?" is much more important than "What does the scale currently say?"

11. I ate 639.5 cookies over the 500 days, totaling 63,953 calories. Mostly my grandma's chocolate chip recipe. It's amazing.

12. My average gross intake has was 2013.95 calories per day, with daily gram averages of 199.28 carbs, 85.52 fat, and 113.58 protein. I burned 491.24 calories/day averaging 5.93 days/week of exercise.

13. It's about feeling better today than yesterday, every day. That's why we do this, and that's what keeps us going. We set goals to get us to the destination, but it's really about the journey.

kami3006 · August 2015

Good luck to ya! I hit 500 tomorrow and certainly have learned a lot.

vanessasaurousrex · August 2015

Good for you. Great info thanks for sharing & good luck :smiley

RyanTahiti · August 2015

Thanks, kami - congrats on the streak! What have you learned that you would add?

RyanTahiti · August 2015

Thank you vanessa - all the best in your journey as well

besee_2000 · August 2015

Those are some awesome stats. This inspires me to be more thorough so one day I can look back and see what worked and what didn't. Thank you for sharing!

BabyPhat90713 · August 2015

Good luck! And great job...i have a while to go before I can leave the nest. One day I hope to be where you are and be saying I can do it without MFP

wonna13 · August 2015

Thank-you so much for putting everything in perspective it was very motivating. I hate you are leaving. You would be a valuable asset to mfp especially for those of us just starting out.

IllustratedxGirl · August 2015

This is great, but you did not address "why I'm quitting"

barbecuesauce · August 2015

I'm glad you've found what works!

4carrera911 · August 2015

Thanks for sharing!!!

JenniferIsLosingIt · August 2015

Best posti have seen here in a longtime!

RyanTahiti · August 2015

Thanks for all your kind replies. Stay strong and keep up the great work!

vixtris · August 2015

Awesome work man! I loved reading your post. Also, I was wondering how you came up with your average calories in/out? Does MFP have a feature that does that?

RyanTahiti · August 2015

vixtris, it's a 3rd-party program that runs a big macro in Excel that taps into your log, then spits out a big spreadsheet with a lot of data to sort through. As a data nerd, I find it very valuable - but as far as I know, MFP still doesn't offer anything like that.