Happy Birthday to Me!

Welcome to the birthday edition of A Fat Lot of Help! I really appreciate all your encouraging comments about my 4-pound loss. It still seems like an awfully small first-week number to me, only a 1% loss when I'm aiming to lose about 56% of my body weight, but I've been overruled by the majority who say it's a good number, so thank you.

A special thanks to Barry this morning! He sent me an email yesterday with some great tips from his own experience, and one of them was a recommendation for a different carb-counting app. It's called the FatSecret Calorie Counter, and it's free, which is always my favorite price. It hooks up with fatsecret.com, and I can enter my intake either on the computer or in my phone and they sync up with each other. That's a feature I particularly wanted, and one that the LoseIt! app I tried also had, but FatSecret, although it's technically calorie-focused rather than carb-focused, does a much better job of carb tracking and display than LoseIt! did. When I went back and entered my meals for the last week as a test of the app and website, I also discovered that my misgivings about the food database in the tracker I had been using previously were well-founded. Many of the numbers were off, some of them by quite a lot, which ended up putting me over my carb limit by as much as 25% on a couple of days. I'm not sure how much that altered the amount of weight I lost, but it has to have affected it at least a little. Anyway, it's going to be FatSecret from this point forward, as it also allows me the option to track my exercise (haha) and there seems to be a huge amount of information and tools freely available on the website, which I haven't had the chance to fully explore yet.

So, yesterday's intake, counted with my new app...

Breakfast: 2 eggs, scrambled, 1/2 lb sausage - 6.68g
Lunch: None
Snack: Cheese stick - .8g
Dinner: 7.5 oz ham steak, 1/3 cup peas - 12.01
Dessert: None
Total: 19.49

I did manage to get out of the birthday dinner thing, so I don't have to worry about that pitfall for a while yet. Also, much as I hate to, I'm going to have to start thinking about doing some exercise. I did do a little one day last week, but one day just isn't going to cut it. Sigh. I know a few of you remember the girl that ran several miles and lifted weights for an hour or more every day in high school...I wonder what ever happened to that girl? Surely she couldn't have become the fat lump sitting at this keyboard? Anyway, on to the rest of my birthday....