In which the food diary lights up like a pinball machine

Ellyn Ritterskamp

Logging my food choices/commitments has been an eye-opener. I started late last week, after my first visit with a registered dietician.

You can have Terrible Food X, but it will be half of that day's calories and fat grams and carbs, and not enough protein to be worth the tradeoff. Ugh. I am doing much better about smaller servings of Terrible Food Xs, since seeing those numbers light up like a pinball game on the web site.

The site is My Fitness Pal, free and only minimally distracting with ad support (except, like this blog, funny when the ad so doesn't match the content. But it can't be helped. We are so glad to have advertisers to keep up afloat, and I'm sure so is My Fitness Pal. So it is funny rather than tragic when there is a mismatch.).

We told it I wanted to lose a half pound a week, and how active I will be, and it said I could shoot for 2146 calories a day. This strikes me as reasonable and fair, not the capricious and mocking 1400 I expected.

Some days I have gotten home from work and faced a choice of snacks to have with my medicine before bed, and I can see now how many calories I have left, rather than just picking over the refrigerator for any and all available tidbits. It gives that meal/snack/situation purpose, rather than having it be a free-for-all while I read.

Today I learned that I probably will not be eating at noodles restaurants A and B much anymore, unless I can figure out how to supersize the delicious and inexpensive cucumber and tomato salad. Everything noodley just kills the carbs and calories. I knew that, but seeing it in print is just different.

To be fair, one of the restaurants indeed has some choices that fall in my ranges, and lucky for me, it's the one close to my house. But the other choices there are just never going to be on the list, even at a half serving.

If it were a scene in a movie, they would be bringing out the scary dunh-dunh-DUNHHHHHH music about now, to let you know something bad is coming and you are about to make the wrong choice. Like telling your friend to wait right here while you go inside the house with the suspicious noises inside. Like going out in such a movie in high heels, and then acquiescing to being chased. And catching your heel in the crack in the sidewalk as the bad person chasing you gets closer.

Oatmeal seems to still be fairly pedestrian and safe, though, so I will see about some for lunch. Even though, no matter what I do to it, it still tastes like oatmeal.

Onward.