If you're REALLY serious

Stupid title, right? Who here isn't really serious about losing weight? Yet there are people who are struggling and having less success than others.

I'm doing very well with MFP. I did well with a similar program I designed for myself before this was available, using Microsoft Excel Mobile and a copy of "Bowes and Church's Food Values of Portions Commonly Used," a book that professional dieticians relied on before the FDA uploaded the whole thing onto the internet. I did less than fine other times, when I tried writing down my foods and then logging into Google docs and entering them later. At least for me, these are my lessons learned:

1. Use the mobile app. That means a smart phone (there may also be an option for handhelds with internet access, but I don't know). I would be very hesitant to suggest such an expensive intervention if I didn't find it essential for me. Besides the cost of the device itself (which you might get someone to give you for a gift, hint, hint), the data plan is an ongoing monthly cost. But when I tried to keep track on paper and then add my foods into a computer later, even with synchronizing work and home computers with Google docs, it didn't work.

Any time you encounter a food of unknown calories, you are left with no guidance. Looking it up later isn't the same. You eat without being able to intelligently consider the consequences. Being able to look up almost any food and either find the exact item or something generally similar is huge. It's like having a diet coach at your shoulder all day. When someone in the office brings in Dunkin Munchkins, you can have one -- but you add its calories, and consider how it will limit your choices later in the day. When you get home after working late ravenously hungry and your choices are to cook a healthy meal or to eat the honey roasted peanuts your husband left on the counter top, you can have a few peanuts to snack on -- but you add their calories. The "toy factor" -- having fun using the scanner to add foods, for instance -- helps encourage you to actually log every peanut, too.


2. Have an aerobic exercise you can do at home, and know the calories consumed for someone of your body weight per minute. A treadmill or bicycle that calculates/displays calorie expenditure based on your current weight is a helpful motivator to keep exercising, so you can eat more food. And eating more food and still losing weight is a good thing. If you see you're going to go over your limit for the day, you start an impromptu session of walking, biking, dancing, or whatever.

3. Have a good home scale to weigh yourself. I've got a digital scale that gives me 1/10s of a pound. I bought it years ago and it's still on the same battery. I've more than gotten my money's worth, though it cost a bit at first. I weigh every day after I wake up, so there is a minimum of water retention to confuse things. I may gain 10 lbs during the course of the day from fluid shifts, and if I had to weigh myself somewhere else, there would be no way to account for that. Weighing every day may be too obsessive for some people, but it allows me to put things into perspective -- I can see the lag time between when I overeat or have too much sodium, and when I bump up in weight, for instance, and I know that if I weigh myself and have gone up despite being under my goal the day before, it's no big deal. (Anyway, I find that concentrating on logging calories from food and exercises takes the emphasis off the small ups and downs in weight. I'm not gaining weight or denying myself food; I'm manipulating numbers.) When I don't weigh myself, I start to gain weight back.

4. Get a food scale. You need cup and teaspoon measures, too, but grams don't lie. You can calculate your calories with much more precision. You can even weigh the container before and after removing your portion (eg, for messy foods like peanut butter) and you know exactly how many calories in things like bananas that aren't a standard size, or things like pasta that don't pack densely into cup measures.

5. Use the recipe function. Enter the recipes for everything you make yourself, so you know the calories. You may surprise yourself that some foods you love are actually low calorie, too.

6. If you have to guestimate how many calories a food is, guestimate that food is higher rather than lower calorie. It's not the end of the world if you lose weight a tiny bit sooner than you expect.

7. Get an idea of what the most calories you're capable of eating at one time is. A Qdoba burrito? Four hot dogs? That will be your entry if you eat an "unmeasured meal" and eat until you are full. I know I can't eat over 1400 calories at a sitting, for instance.