I’ve learned over my dieting years that if I begin on a plan at low calories, such as 1200, I’m hungry and have more stalls than if I eat a higher amount of calories.  I think I tried some Woman’s World diet where they started you out at 1400 calories and I thought that was high.  But I followed it and lost weight without having to go so low.

On one of my Weight Watchers forays, after I realized this fact, I started at a daily points value at least 2 points higher than what was recommended.  Once the weight started slowing, I decreased a point.  This allowed me to eat more, not feel so deprived and to ease into lower calorie consumption.  This also makes it easier to maintain.  It might take a bit longer to reach goal but I’ve found it to be more steady.

So even though many plans suggest I start my weight loss at 1200 calories a day, I’ve started at 1600.  I have already lost 1.3 pounds in one week, which is how I like to lose – slow and steady.  Of course, being petite and small boned and being able to lose on 1600 calories a day shows just how much I must have been eating before dieting.  Too much!

So if you’ve been putting on pounds because of overeating, binge eating, etc., don’t start your diet by eating too few calories.  Try 1800 calories if you’re starting out heavier than me.  If you’re now eating 2,500 calories a day, even starting at 2,000/day can get your weight kick-started and it will be much easier to stick with it.

Once the weight loss stalls (less than 0.5 lbs. a week in my book), you can drop 50-100 calories and see if that helps.  Instead of dropping calories, you could also up your exercise first.

The Home Page

Pros:

• Very easy-to-use with an intuitive interface
• Meals are already split up so you can easily get the right food in the correct meal
• You can copy full meals to another day which is great for those same meals you eat a lot
• It has a very large database of foods
• It shows your most recent foods
• Instead of having a “Favorites” section it keeps track of most used foods
• It can take recipes
• It has a barcode scanner and it’s the first one I got to work but it wasn’t easy, although I was holding both the iPad and the bag I was trying to scan.  Maybe if I had set it down on a flat surface it would have worked better.
• Only app I kept that works offline
• Once you’re finished for the day you click a button & it tells you what you might weigh in 5 weeks if you ate this way every day.  Probably not accurate but a fun feature.
• Has a nice “daily totals” section which adds your activity calories to what is left – the only app that does that out of the others I’ve tried.  The others show activity calories but they don’t add them to your total consumable calories.  I’ve learned that I lose best when I eat everything coming to me in my range.

This app is simply called Cal Counter and is by Viaden Mobile, who also produces gaming software.  As you can see from the screenshot, it has a nice colorful interface.  The red line shows your daily food and activity calorie data.  It is easy-to-use and the meals are divided up already so you can go right to the specific meal and start adding food.  This is something that is turning me off to SparkPeople, as it is an extra step to designate which meal a food goes to and it’s easy to add it to the last meal you were working on.  I was thinking that this app would go next, but I’m going to give it another week before making my decision on my top 2.

Pros:

• nice looking with good color scheme
• easy-to-use
• can save favorites easily, but you have to remember to hit the star after new additions if you want to save them as favorites
• editing measurements using a roller thingy is easy but you still have to make another adjustment even with the roller if the exact amount isn’t shown
• you can take pictures of your foods & I think you can search by the photos (I had no interest in that)
• you can save recipes

It was easy-to-use and some of you might like what I didn’t.  It is a bland, vanilla interface.  Kind of gray, black & white coloring, very simplistic.  I’ve learned that not everyone likes color like me after reading reviews about blog and website templates.  I’ve heard “beautiful” described for a very plain WordPress template, for example, and I didn’t see it.

fatsecret calorie counter home page

As I’ve mentioned before, dieting isn’t fun and neither is tracking it every day.  I want something to lighten and brighten the task, and fatsecret’s calorie counter didn’t do that for me.

Pros:

• easy-to-use
• great roller thingy for figuring portion sizes – it usually had a lot of choices unlike some others I’ve tried
• has a barcode scanner, although it never worked, but if I manually entered the code it would find the item
• has a good selection of items plus popular brands, supermarket brands and restaurants
• has a sync capability
• has an exercise diary and weight tracker

I’ve been a member of Spark People for a long time.  I counted calories on several different diets online using their service.  It wasn’t my first online calorie counting website but I can’t remember the first one I started out with.  I pretty much settled on Spark People.

I got to know a couple members as I actually posted some blog posts through the website.  I decided I didn’t want to keep my posts to a website that I didn’t know if it would last or change, so I created this blog. It’s my diet diary and hopefully some of my posts, trials and tribulations can help someone else.

If you’re a member of Spark People you can sync whatever you add on the iPad with the online website.  Supposedly, there are a couple differences between the two but I haven’t been using the online version so I can’t tell you what they are.

iPad App

I love the look of the SparkPeople iPad app.  As you can see it is very colorful and fun.  Dieting isn’t fun, and neither is tracking calories, so they try to lighten it up.

Pros:

• looks great
• pretty easy-to-use
• can easily save favorites
• can save a recipe or meal through “food grouping”
• has a large database of foods
• searching foods is pretty good and you get two choices of search words

I am now down to Spark People, an app called Cal Counter with a green Apple logo, MyFitnessPal and another Calorie Counter app from fatsecret. No more converting points with Weight Watchers Points Plus. As I’ve mentioned before, to me it’s just another step having to convert calories to points.

I’ll go through each individual app and list my pros and cons. What’s nice about the iPad is that I take it almost everywhere I go and even if it’s just in the car, I can record my meals wherever I happen to be. Most of the time I can remember and wait until I get home, but the option is there.

I could also download some or all of these apps to my phone but to me I prefer the larger screen of the iPad to work on. Of course, now I’ll be putting my calories down on 4 different apps every day unless I decide to delete yet another. I might give it a week and stick with my favorite(s), although so far I’m liking them all.

But something happened.  First off, when you reach goal (and under), you feel like you’ve learned how to eat right and you don’t need to be so rigid with constantly journaling points.  In fact, I started hating doing that, even though it kept me on track.

So I quit and I was able to keep the weight off for at least a year.  But once you start getting bad eating habits that weight can pile back on so quickly!  Eventually, that’s what happened.

I tried other diet plans with some success and even attempted another try at Weight Watchers.  I went to the meetings and got within 4 pounds of my goal but I didn’t like the meetings.  I once again hated counting points.  To me, it was just an added step to calorie counting if you were doing it on your own.

I tried Weight Watchers Points Plus last October, doing it online.  I loved it at first and I still think it’s a good plan.  But once again, I got tired of converting points and that attempt didn’t last long.

Trying it last month was a bust.  I had a difficult time staying with it.  It’s a new month and I’m just counting calories using some apps on my iPad.  I’ll be writing about that during this month and hopefully I can have some fun using my iPad to help me lose.  I have to remind myself to cancel my monthly WW online subscription – I haven’t used it much since I started it up last year.

Writing down what I’m eating really shows me what’s actually going into my mouth, or what I’d like to be eating on a daily basis.  Now instead of having 3 or more squares of good chocolate, I am down to one.  Same with my two Pamela’s Gluten Free cookies I usually have with lunch or dinner.  That’s also been reduced to one.  Thank goodness for the 0 point fruit because I’d be really hungry right now and I’m kind of having “food withdrawal” feelings.

It is also making me rethink some things.  For dinner tonight I had a can of gluten free cream of mushroom soup.  I usually pair that with potato chips (my favorite is Cape Cod 40% less fat).  When I realized the small amount of chips I’d get, I substituted 2 cups of white cheddar organic popcorn.  And you know what?  That was actually satisfying.  It gave me the mouth chew and crunch I needed and 2 cups is a decent portion vs. the smaller amount of chips I’d get.

Even while eating well I am going over my allotted 26 daily points.  I’m a believer in using all of my allowed points, including the extra weekly points and any activity points earned.  I’ve written about this before – I’ve noticed that when I don’t eat enough trying to speed weight loss it backfires and that’s when I plateau.

I started in the middle of my online Weight Watchers week and I was going to try to figure out the extra weekly points so I didn’t go too crazy as the new ones will start again tomorrow.  I’m not going to worry about it as I only used 3 yesterday and 5 today.  These were my kick-start days and tomorrow will begin my first full week back on plan.  And I can tell it’s going to be a challenge.

Once treatment was over I was good for a while but then fell off the wagon.  Sometimes I actually felt that if I wasn’t going to make it I should enjoy myself and eat what I wanted – life is too short.  I knew I had been gaining weight but it hit me when I went on vacation last week and I didn’t have anything to wear.  Nothing fit unless it was stretchy.  I felt uncomfortable and knew that this couldn’t go on.  On the last day of our trip we went to a fancy restaurant where we indulged and I actually felt uncomfortably stuffed.  That was when I got that “click” and knew that I was going to go back on an eating plan.

I never canceled my online Weight Watchers subscription so decided to go back on the Points Plus program.  I had done well with it and thought the new plan with most fruits and veggies at 0 points was genius.  It makes a person who doesn’t go to fruits and vegetables first, like me, think twice.  At my vacation home we have an orange tree with the sweetest oranges and I brought some home with me.  Had one this morning – the start to my weight loss so I can fit into my clothes again and not be embarrassed.

I was raised on candy, chips, pretzels, ice cream, cookies, cakes, etc.  My Mom would cook every night and we ate well, but our pantry was filled with junk food.  Luckily, I was a skinny kid and the weight gain didn’t really come until my 2nd child.  I had a little spurt as a teenager once we started driving and we didn’t ride our bikes or walk as much.  But I nipped that in the bud quickly and didn’t really have problems until my 2nd pregnancy.

What I have noticed is that when I don’t eat fruit first before any other snacks then my sugar and carb desire spikes and I want to binge.  If I have fruit first it fills me up and if I still need a sweet treat I don’t go all wacky and start eating snacks left and right, going from sweet to salty (usually potato chips).  WW PP rewards us for eating our fruits and veggies by not charging us points for most of them, so I don’t know why I’m suddenly having such a hard time.

Funny thing is, I went out to dinner the other night with friends and had a salad followed by gelato and I was fine with my points that day.  I binged the next day.  I noticed I felt tired and didn’t feel like myself, which is maybe why I started eating junk.

Today I ate good and light.  I didn’t have any candy and just finished having a delicious, perfectly ripe organic pear.  I ate under my daily points to help make up for yesterday.  I will try to do the same tomorrow.   As long as I can pick myself up from those bad days I should be fine.  More fruits and veggies for me = less junk.  Unfortunately, fruits were never my “go-to” snack.  I also want to get back to juicing and maybe I’ll start tomorrow.  When I did it before I didn’t have a desire to eat the nasty stuff as much.  I need to get back to that place.