Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with caloriecounting

My mystifying metabolism, defying all logic

egeanin — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 11:35:58 -0800

Over the last 4 weeks, I've changed both my eating habits and my exercise habits pretty drastically. Yet I'm still at the exact same weight and body fat percentage. Why? At 150 lbs, 5'6, I'm about 20 pounds heavier than I'd like to be. Although I have a healthy BMI, my body fat percentage is stuck around 28%. Having done a ton of research, I set out to lose those 20 pounds four weeks ago by the following methods, and am completely flummoxed as to why there's been no change.

This is what I have done, FAITHFULLY, for 4 weeks:
--45 minutes of cardio, 3 days a week (hard enough to sweat)
--45 minutes of pilates/strength training, 1 or 2 days a week, hard enough to be sore for 2 days following each session
--Cut out most carbs, except berries, occasional whole grains and 1 glass red wine a day
--Restricted my diet to 1800 calories a day. Very strict about this, using measuring cups.
--Keeping a food diary and an exercise diary
--Seeing a personal trainer once a week (with whom I do my strength training)
--Never eating fast food, junk, ice cream, etc (I never did anyway.)
--Drinking 8 glasses of water a day, no matter what

And can you believe it, I've lost NO weight. Not even water weight. My body fat percentage has also not dropped. I HAVE lost some inches, in that I can fit into my clothes somewhat better-- but believe me, it's nothing spectacular. I've gone from a size 10 to an 8-- barely. But that's the only difference.

To put it in perspective, my boyfriend has just done the low carb part with me, and he's lost ten pounds in the last month. Without having gone to the gym once or counted calories.

What am I doing wrong? I don't want to cut my calories too far below 1800 or I know I won't be able to keep it up for long. This is a lifestyle change, not a get-thin-quick plan. But I want to at least see some numeric change after a month's worth of work.

Having calculated my basal metabolic rate, 1800 was supposed to yield a steady drop of 1-2 pounds a week. I know muscle weighs more than fat, but the fact that my bodyfat percentage has remained the same, has me discounting that. I have been very, very good about counting the calories.

Please help! I feel so discouraged. I'm proud of myself for being so disciplined, but this is getting ridiculous. Thanks for any advice or anecdotes about your own weight loss experiences.

Calorie counting 2.0?

gakiko — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 02:01:31 -0800

Please help me find an online calorie counter/tracker that works for me! I've been using the PC version of FitDay for a long time. It has its quirks, but I learned to live with them. But as I'm spending less and less time on my home computer (and more time on my work and SO's computers), I'd like to find an online calorie tracker that meets these requirements:

- lets me use metric as well as US measure units
- lets me add custom foods
- has easy lookup of foods and adding to daily total
- is free to use

Bonus points for:
- grouping by meals (breakfast/lunch/dinner)
- defining custom meals or recipes
- defining favorite foods or meals for easy adding
- web2.0/AJAX/all the bells and whistles of modern web app design

I live in Europe so I'd probably add a lot of local food stuffs and products. One of the trackers I tried put everyone's custom food into a single shared database, which I think would be rather confusing. I tried online version of FitDay, but it was rather clunky. I also tried NutritionData, and it has the most un-user-friendly interface I've ever seen. After RTFM-ing and spending at least 30 minutes trying to add one single meal, I had to give up on it. I spent 10 minutes on SparkPeople before feeling totally overwhelmed and running away from it. I want to track calories, not participate in a community! (I'm a Hacker's Diet devotee, by the way.)

So, any other ideas, please?

(Alternatively: is there an easy way to use FitDay on more than one computer and share my user data?)

Custom Calorie Counting

daver — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 09:47:23 -0800

How to: Calorie Counting and home cooking? On the go? Ok, so I'm sold on the hackers diet and I'd like to track calorie consumption. Easy to do if I eat packaged food, but I don't.

What's the easiest/best way of 'calorie counting' meals cooked from scratch? What's the best? Are there any sites which specialize in assembling ingredients and weights into weight divisible calorie portions?

How about meals I didn't prepare, say something at a restaurant other than a nation wide chain?

I definitely don't need 100% accuracy, is there a easy estimator that will get in into the 80% range?

Lastly -- the calorie part of it doesn't make much sense without the portion part of it -- what are the good tips for portion measuring on the go? A small scale?

Thanks Ask Mi!

Meal planning software for OSX?

synecdoche — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 17:30:09 -0800

Any recommendations for meal-planning software I can run on my iBook? I am looking for a computer program that I can run on my iBook (OSX.4) that I can use to plan my meals out for a week. Ideally, this will let me enter the meals I want to make for each week, with the component ingredients, and will then create a shopping list of the items I need, a weekly calendar listing the actual recipes, as well as giving me space to track the calories and other nutritional data for each day (or, even better, figure out this data for me).

I know there are websites (fitday comes to mind) that do this but as I would prefer something that is not dependent on Internet access. Also, things like fitday seem more geared toward tracking consumption while the most important thing to me is planning.

I'd also like it to be able to "remember" recipes. For example, if I entered "Apple Cinnamon Pancakes" as an item with certain ingredients one time, the next time I entered "Apple Cinnamon Pancakes" it'd pull up that information for me from a recipe database that I can create.