@chelseynikole9618 : I hope you're feeling better!

Thanks for all the info on the Nutritional Yeast. I went to the store and saw exactly one brand, lol. I live in the sticks. I didn't get it because it was flakes not the ground up kind and I was kind of confused--again. It probably doesn't make a difference I would think, tho. I might order some online.

I also only use the flakes…they disappear or add nice texture if sprinkled on something cold.

@AnnPT77 : Oof, did not think of a health food store! We have a couple here--I'll see if the yeast is available. And if it is, it has the B vits.

All: From all your responses (thank-you! ) I think I might try the flakes now, lol.

So good that you are feeling better.

I have stopped counting calories recently (this weekend) and I am focusing on my nutrition plan, tracking on paper.
I don’t want to gain weight. I will see how it goes.
Have you guys made “pauses” in your tracking ?

I still track most of the time (year 8 of maintenance). During loss and early months of maintenance, I tracked like it was religion. (I'm glad I did, because my personal logging data told me that MFP is waaaaay off in its calorie estimate for me. That's not common, but it can happen.) I tried a week or two without logging at one point, and it was kind of a train wreck. (I'm not saying it would be for anyone else. This is definitely n=1 territory.)

I'm profoundly an undisciplined hedonist, want to eat every single delicious calorie I'm entitled to . . . but I want to keep at a healthy weight, because that greatly improves my quality of life vs. being obese. Counting helps me balance short term happiness with long term happiness.

If I don't log, one of two things happens: Hedonist me eats too much, therefore cr*ps on future me (I did that for decades) . . . or anxiety about gain makes me eat less than I could, so I lose weight - that's not bad in itself, but it hacks off my inner hedonist (retrospective FOMO?).

For me, logging balances those two tendencies very conveniently.

These days, I do skip some days that would be wild estimates, or occasional days where I'm very busy or the like, but those aren't the usual thing. I know that the majority of my days will cause the majority of my outcome, so I log most days.

I also like having the nutritional detail, so I can hit my goals there most of the time: 100g protein minimum, 50g fat minimum, 400g fruit/veggie minimum (ideally more like 800g), 25g fiber, hit the MFP-tracked micros on average over the week, balance MUFAs/PUFAs with sat fats, balance O-3 and O-6, get some food-sourced probiotics. Logging keeps my eyes on those prizes.

As a vegetarian, I know that good nutrition requires slightly more conscious thought than it would for even whole-foods-ish omnivores. Besides that, I'm a data geek in other ways. (That's my nature, but it was amplified by my profession.) The "measure what you want to manage" platitude works well.

Others will differ, and that's as it should be.

I agree with you all, if I don’t track I will gain weight.

I still track on paper and aim to eat what my nutritionist told me to.
I must admit it is great not to focus on calories anymore.
I will see in one month if it works out OK !!!

Great progress @chelseynikole9618 !

Last week's colonoscopy was quite the ordeal, mainly because I had to stop eating many of my staples for a week (nuts and seeds) and reduce fiber as much as possible for 3 days. It also took a long time to feel normal after the anesthesia (I slept a lot this weekend). Today was the first day I am feeling like I'm getting back to normal food-wise (I don't do well with fasting and it took a bit to find my stride again). My workout today still sucked, but I went to the gym to keep the habit alive and kept it light.

The test results were fine - but I went straight into PMS mode and am only now starting to feel somewhat normal again. I decided to not step on the scale until the end of the month…I had a few days of excessive calories and will just regroup without beating myself up.

Hello, all!

I've been AWOL myself for a bit, but have been reading here. Life got a bit complicated. I crashed my car. Low speed, no one hurt, and what I'd call moderate damage to the front quarter of my car, but it was 15 years old so the insurance company totaled it. I had a rental car (under my insurance policy) temporarily, but had to rush around and buy a new car. That is finally done. I'm driving it, and there are only a couple of small issues to address remaining.

Spring is really rolling out here now, finally. I hope and expect to start on-water rowing soon. I've gotten in some bike rides on the local paved trails on nice days (15 miles/24 km or so each time), which was lovely. I've mixed in some stationary bike on bad-weather days, but have skipped more workout days than usual because of the car nonsense and some fatigue that's possibly related to a health issue that's still of mysterious cause. I've had many tests and scans, most things so far looking within the range of normal for a woman my age (68), so not sure what's going on.

I'm way behind on garden work and other home chores, given the unexpected events. My weight seems to have been creeping down a bit now, after creeping up a bit over the Winter: Kind of normal maintenance for me. I think that's about all I've got for updates, but here is a close-up of the dogwood tree right outside my living room window, taken from the deck outside the living room. You can see a faint hint of the pink-flowering plum/cherry (Prunus sp.) tree behind it. There's also a lovely-scented Viburnum out of sight that wafts scent through my open living room window - such a treat after a stuffy indoor Winter.



@Maya440, I hope the physiotherapy will resolve your tendinitis soon, and clear the way for triathlon progress.

@henridw2095, glad to hear you made it through the colonoscopy (prep is so stressful!), got good results, and are starting to feel better again. The temporary blips in eating habits will end, I'm sure.

@chelseynikole9618, congratulations on your progress: Keep up the good habits, it does pay off.

Greetings and well-wishes to others I've not named!

Curvykinkycurls wrote: »

it can be time consuming (esp cooking 2 meals due to my family being meat eaters). Do you all log as you cook, directly onto the app, or do you write it down & log later?

I leave some scrap paper (mostly used envelopes and the like) and a couple pens next to my scale. When I cook something, I weigh ingredients as I add them to the pan. I can just use an empty yogurt container, tare it once, add ingredients to it from the cutting board, and toss it on the scale before throwing it into the pan. I scribble it down.

I do the same when making a salad. I don't weigh the greens; I estimate volume. That works fine. My salad starts with six cups of mixed greens. I then weigh the half serving of dressing and toss. I then weigh all the other veggies as they go in.

For simple things like roasted root vegetables, I just weigh the vegetable before I cut it up. I weigh the oil by the negative method. I tare the bottle without a lid, pour out what I think is eleven grams, then confirm on the scale. Scribble that down.

Later, when the food is cooking or in the oven, I use my phone to enter the ingredients. I usually don't have to search for ingredients in the database because I use a lot of the same ingredients over and over.

I bought a couple cheap plastic bench scrapers (and a nice steel one) to move ingredients off the cutting board. Holds more than my knife. Easy-peasy.

If there's an ingredient that isn't already a commonly used one, I circle it on my scratch paper and use the computer to find it in the database later. I have an easier time finding NEW ingredients on the computer and entering common ones from my phone.

I usually still know how many calories are in my meal before it's finished cooking.

Lately I make soups pretty often. This is where I take a short cut. I don't use recipes. The soups are never the same. But they are close enough. Yesterday I made beet and potato soup. I have a "recipe" I made a long time ago for borscht in my recipes. I just weigh how much I'm about to eat and log that. It's not exact, but it's close enough. Same with the butternut squash soup I made before or the split pea and barley soup before that. The first time I make the recipe, I weigh all the ingredients. When the soup is done, I weigh out the first bowl I eat while it's still hot and write that down. Before I put the rest in the fridge, I weigh out however much there is. I add the bowl I already ate. This gives me the total weight for the whole batch. When I enter the recipe in MFP, I set the number of servings to the number of grams I made of finished soup. It always asks, "Are you sure you man that there's 3257 servings in this recipe?" Yep. Then when I take some out of the fridge, I can just weigh it when I put it in the pot to reheat or into my bowl if I'm eating it cold like I sometimes do with the beet soup.

Easy-peasy.