Herro, 3-hunnert pounds!

Gah! I've known I had been gaining weight, but hadn't realized how  much until this morning. Early morning walks are now mandatory. I wonder if I can set up my oak desk at work to be a standing workstation. :^D

Falafel

I still haven't figured out why it sounds like "Fall Awful."

Because She told me to

After becoming a member of FatSecret at the recommendation of my friend, Bill, I have finally begun using it to record my intake. Unlike Bill, I don't have one of the favored smartphone platforms (iPhone, Android, or Blackberry), so I had to come up with my own method of keeping track of my food when I'm away from my computer.

Back when I was on Crate Watchers, I was emailing my food to my own Gmail inbox with an alias added, whose filter would see the alias and sort the message accordingly as well as forward the message to my wife who would tell me approximately how many Weight Watchers points my meal was worth. After that I could fill in my Crate Watchers Tracking Sheet (a Google Docs spreadsheet) with the appropriate information.

Unfortunately for me, I have to do it on my own now, as Allison's diet has it's own website, science,  and food. While I've been trying to similarly cut back and eat healthier, she was concerned that I might not be getting enough of a balanced diet at the same time. She asked me to record my intake for at least a few days so we could take a look at the results. This left me with the question of where to go to do this. There are a number of places to do this, but I was already a member of FatSecret and was suitably impressed with their options, so I decided to give them a try, and I like it now that I don't need to worry about forgetting to enter my food if I don't want to run back and forth between my computer and the kitchen as I build my meal.

My solution consists of using Remember The Milk (AKA RTM, my favoritest reminder service), and a message template stored on my phone. I only use this message in MMS form, so that a particularly long list of ingredients isn't cut into smaller messages by SMS character length limitations. The message is customized to tell RTM everything it needs to make a new task. I'll explain what each part does. Here's what it looks like:

T: Log Meal
P: 3
D: Now
S: Dieting
U: http://www.fatsecret.com/
---

• The "T" tells RTM what the name of the task is. When emailing a new task to RTM, you can usually just name the task in the subject line of the message, but sending the message from my phone without this specified in the message body was somehow throwing off all the rest of the settings, so I have to specify it in the message body.
• The "P" sets the priority of the task. You can choose 1, 2, 3, or not specify a priority. Most of my RTM usage does not involve priorities, so even a priority of 3 sends this straight to the top.
• The "D" sets the due date/time.
• The "S" specifies what tags are applied to the task
• I bet you can guess what the "U" does. Ha!
• The 3 hyphens designate the area for notes to attach to the task.

When I start assembling my meal, I open this template and my cursor pops down to the end of the message. This is exactly where I need it to be when I start listing the foods I'm about to consume. For items not taken directly from single serving packages, I weigh them on the scale (usually in grams), then make note of the weight and item in the message. I can end up with a big list if I'm having a bowl of salad, or just a couple of items. Either way, I've got a task recorded on the web to remind me what I need to do later on, along with a way to keep track of when it was done and what I ate.  Woohoo!!

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From within sight of The Cheesecake Factory

I packed a chicken and red pepper sandwich. Yum!

Because I have a cold

I thought a big bowl of fake pho would do the trick. I think it's working.

Beginning again... again...

After taking a Winter break from paying much attention to my weight, I'm hopping back on the (seemingly smaller) wagon. I'm no longer using my GPS equipped flip phone to keep track of my "exercising," but have a new solution instead. After our family has tentatively taken up Geocache hunting, we bought a bluetooth GPS to use with my phone to look for caches. I can also use these same tools as a pedometer to track my walking and other imitations of exercise. Using the Map My Fitness family of websites (different titles for different activities, but the same underneath), I can upload my adventures and let the website calculate the results of what I've done. I've added two widgets to my sidebar (did you notice the all-new layout?) to show my latest activites and my cumulative results.  Pretty cool!

My wife is on her second week of Medi-Fast, which I'm vaguely shadowing her on. I'm trying to eat little healthy bits every couple of hours, and eating much less of the foods we've been giving the kids (pasta, nuggets, cheddar cheese).

Also of note, my daughter's formerly latent interest in Basketball has nearly become an obsession. I LOVE basketball, so I'm only too happy to hit the court with her and rebound as much as she wants to shoot the ball.

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Scaling Back

After a brief respite that included losing my job, then enjoying Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, and not much good weather for enjoying the outdoors, we've reengaged with South Beach. We stocked up the pantry, fridge, and freezer with good stuff and are ready to strike out for slimmer clothes.

I have regained about 12lbs. from sitting about looking for work, despite all the yummy food I was enjoying along the way. I'm currently just under 265, and only managed to fit into my old button-fly Levi's for one day (less if you account for how tight they were) at my slightest weight, but I'm determined to continue the trip down to 240. I still don't know how far I'll have to go after that.  We'll see.

The one thing I can say is that this time, it seems much easier to jump into the diet. I'm feeling good about it. 

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