The Makings of a Successful Diet, Part 2 - The Lose It App

So as promised I'm going to go over why I love the Lose It app and some of it's features.  This is by no means going to cover every aspect of Lose It.  I encourage you to have fun and explore the app for yourself!  I guess I should mention that I am in no way associated with the creators of Lose It...I just love it!

So the first thing that you'd want to do when diving into this app is set up your profile.  It's been a little while so I can't remember if it guided me through this or if I pegged it out on my own.  Either way it isn't very difficult to figure out.  There is a section under the "More" tab on the bottom where you can click on "Lose It! Account" and then "Edit Profile Details".

Click "Lose It! Account"

Click "Edit Profile Details"

But what you want is to enter a goal...and it's got a tab for that.  There are 2 things that you can do under the "goals" tab 1) Modify program, or 2) Record Today's Weight.  You're going to need to get a program going so that's where you want to be!

Enter all your starting information

Click "Modify Program"

After you put all your starting information in you need to click on the "My Plan" section of the Program page (shown above, right).  Here is where you tell the app how many pounds you would like to lose each week.  Notice that it won't let you select any more than 2 pounds.  To me this is a sign of a good program.  It's not going to help you starve yourself and lose weight too quickly which is NOT healthy.  Of course, you may lose more than the 2 pounds, but at least it won't help you abuse your body and health.

Once you select how many pounds per week you would like to lose you'll notice that at the bottom of the "My Plan" page where you just clicked around, it will tell you by what date you should achieve your goal.  Pretty neat.  It also will tell you your daily calorie budget.

Weekly weight loss goal

Off the program page (right below where you selected "My Plan") is a section called "Daily Calorie Budget".  I haven't used this, but apparently this is a place where you can adjust your calories.  In other words, you want your budget to be for fewer calories than the program assigned to you to achieve your goal.  There is certainly a section here that explains why you may need to do this, but I'll let you explore that for yourself.

Should you need to adjust

Now that you're all set up, you should check out your homepage.  On Lose It this is the "My Day" tab.

This page is great.  You can add food that you've eaten and exercises that you've done from this tab.  Sooooo easy.  It also tells you how many calories you have left for the day.  You can see that I'm fairly close to my limit with 197 left.  It also says that I'm 897 calories under for the week.  The week goes from Monday through Sunday and then resets.  I really don't pay much attention to the pie chart beneath that that tells me about my fat and carbs.  I suppose it could come in useful, but it's just not something I've ever paid much attention to.

So far I've described a fairly basic app for dieting.  All that stuff is great, but you need to put your food in there and sometimes that can be downright painful.  This is the REAL reason I love Lose It...

Select your meal

You click on "Add Food" then select which meal you're adding for (or a snack...which isn't a bad thing!) and then you've got a page with all these wonderful choices!  My favorite?  Scan barcode.  I can scan a bottle of Guinness and it knows the calories!  You can also adjust just how much of that bottle of Guinness you drank!

How to add food

How much Guinness was that?

So I love the ability to scan barcodes.  I really, really do.  Any once you do the food is stored under that tab "My Foods" so you can look for it there or be lazy like me and just scan the darned thing again and again and again (do I drink too much Guinness?).  But you can do so much more here.  You can "Search Foods" to find something that either doesn't have a barcode, or perhaps you got an error with the barcode and that Guinness turn up as a slice of pizza (sadly errors do happen, but I haven't seen too many of them).

If you eat the same thing for breakfast everyday...click on "Previous Meals" and it'll let you scroll through what you've logged before and enter it again for today.  One drawback here is that it enters the WHOLE thing, so if you select a previous breakfast it will log everything that you ate for breakfast that previous day.  You can always go back and edit your meals so it isn't the end of the world if you didn't have your morning coffee with your bagel...just remove it.

You can also add a recipe.  I LOVE this feature too.  When I'm cooking (or before I start) I go through and create a recipe (I'll talk about that in a bit) and then the nutritional information for my recipe is there so I can add it whenever I make it.  Just like with any other food, you can adjust how many servings you ate.  You also know how many calories are in those chicken strips you make each week!

Going out to eat?  No worries.  Many restaurant foods can be found here too!  Just click on "Brand Name Foods" and select "Restaurant Foods" (yes you can enter something from a supermarket here too, but you can also scan the code...check here if it doesn't scan).  You'll see that there are so many restaurants to chose from and then so much to select under each restaurant.

Eating out?  Check here!

Is everything in there?  Heck no, but if it isn't you can search for it's nutritional information online and then enter it in your app.  What did you just say?  ENTER IT INTO THE APP!?!?!

YES!  You can create your own food item!  See the bottom of the page where you decided how to enter what you ate (scan barcode, recipes, etc)?  Well at the very bottom it says "Create New Food".  Too cool and too easy!

So how easy is it to create recipe?  Fairly easy.  It would be nice if you clicked on "Recipe" above and be able to select to add a new one, but sadly it will only let you add a recipe you already created.  Not to fear, just head over to the "More" tab where you started out entering your profile info.

Click on "Recipes"

Click "Edit Food & Exercises"

So you click on "Edit Food & Exercises" and then click "Recipes".  Here you'll find all the recipes you've entered and a little plus sign "+" at the top right of the page.  Click on that and you'll be able to create a new recipe!

Select a recipe or make a new one!

Now how many servings do you put for a recipe?  If it's a recipe from a cookbook that tells you how many servings it makes, you can go by what they say.  Honestly though, if you make a Chicken Pot Pie and you know that it serves your family of 4 and you still have 2 servings left, then it serves 6 so you know how many servings to put down.  Aren't sure how many a new recipe you're trying will serve?  No biggie.  Guess.  Yep...guess and then you can edit your recipe after dinner when you know for sure.  I've done that numerous times.  It's one of the things that makes this app so easy.  You can edit the recipe instead of having to delete it and redo the whole thing.

I've created recipes for things as little as a cup of tea.  Why?  Because each time I make a cup of tea, I don't want to enter the amount of sugar, milk and tea I use.  It's the same each time so this is much easier to do.

What a recipe looks like

So did you see what is at the bottom of that recipe?  You can share your recipes with friends using Lose It!!!!!

I'll briefly mention the "Log" tab.  You can go here to see what all you've eaten as well as edit/remove something that's on there.  You can use this page to add more food with the plus sign "+" at the top right instead of through the "My Day" page.

Mmmm...ice cream....

So as you can see, I'm allotted 1451 calories each day.  Do I eat more than that?  Usually...and yes, I've busted my calorie allotment from time to time.  That's OK.  Just don't do it everyday.  Anyway, so how can I be eating over my calorie limit and still lose weight?  Remember to EXERCISE!!!  If you burn 300 calories exercising then you can eat 300 more calories (or not...depending on how hungry you are).

Exercise can be so many different things and this app covers so many of them!  You can even enter how long you played Hula Hoops on the Wii Fit...yep...you read that right.  It even has SEX in there as an exercise and what its "Intensity" was.  LOL.  Count it all!  Don't see an exercise in there that you do?  You can create a new exercise!  So easy and comprehensive.

Add an exercise

Wii Fit anyone?

I mentioned yesterday that a friend posted that she was using this app and wanted to know if anyone else was using it and/or would join her using it.  So what was all that about?  Well there's a tab at the bottom called "Motivate" and you can have friends join you on the app to encourage you.  They can see your progress (and if you've been busting your calorie limits for the day!) and they can see how much exercise you do (or don't do!).  Peer pressure can sometimes be a good thing.  Keeps you honest!

Spy on friends! :)

Get motivated!

Don't have friends?....OK, I'm kidding...but even if your friends don't want to join Lose It you can still find other ways to get motivated with this app.  You can join a group/team that's doing a particular activity.  You can join a challenge (kind of like a team, but usually for a specific period of time).

Challenges

Groups & Teams

You can also earn badges for weight loss as well as for just continuing to log your progress.  That's important too.  Everyone loses weight at different rates and you shouldn't get discouraged!

You need some stinkin' badges!

There's also a profile that you can create under motivate that your friends can check out to see what your goals are!

Motivate Profile

OK, so it's getting late and I wanted to get this post out.  I've come to realize that I'm starting to get a bit loopy.  Perhaps I've tried to fit too much in one post.  Perhaps it's time to step away from the computer and do some walking.  Either way, it's time to end this post.

Some final thoughts.  Lose It is so important to how I lose weight because I simply did not know how many calories I was eating each day.  If I were honest I'd guess I was eating close to 3000 calories and doing very little by way of exercising.  No wondering my weight was going nowhere but up.

Was it difficult to reduce what I was eating?  Yes.  That first week was hard, and I'm sure my family didn't like me much, but I made sure that I entered EVERYTHING.  If you cheat and don't then don't wonder why you aren't losing weight.  After that first week, I got used to eating less and it became easier.  Having to enter something I ate in the program also caused me to turn and walk away from the pantry on more than one occasion.

This app helps with moderation.  Yes, I can still have a cookie or piece of cake, but now I know how that's impacting my calories for the day.  I may walk a little longer to make sure I make up for it, but now I KNOW how much I'm eating and when you're dieting...Knowledge is Power!

The Makings of a Successful Diet, Part 1 - Why I Decided to do It

I've mentioned in previous posts that I'm dieting and using some apps to help me along.  I wanted to post on my diet for some time and then I went on vacation and drove from Colorado to Pennsylvania with lots of stops in between.  I've returned home to Colorado and my children and I survived, a.k.a - I didn't choke them although they really made me want to at times!  So after unwinding from the drive and starting to put the house back in order, I'm ready to post on my diet.

The apps that I'm going to post on are called LoseIt and Striiv.  I chose them because they got pretty great reviews and were FREE!  Gotta love free!  But why use an app?  Why not just diet?  Good question, thank you for asking.  That's the reason for this post.  You gotta understand why I use apps before diving into the apps themselves.

I was in the military for nearly 10 years.  My last assignment was as a Drill Sergeant (DS).  One of the many things that you're responsible for as a DS is Soldiers that are on the Army Weight Control Program (AWCP...unless the acronym has changed since I got out many moons ago).  I never had a problem with my weight when I was in the military.  I ate what I wanted and I did the Physical Training (PT) that my unit did and I was fine.  For many Soldiers with different body types and metabolisms this is not enough.  A Soldier on AWCP would usually be given additional PT.  This can certainly help, but it's not a solution.  We would always tell our Soldiers to keep a food log.  To write down everything that they ate each day and how much.  Sounds great on paper and a food log can be very helpful...if you know what a serving size is and how many calories are in each serving.  The bottom line is it was really up to them to lose the weight or they would be separated from the service.

So I got out of the Army pregnant with my 2nd child and there was no one to whip this former DS back into shape after leaving.  To add to the lack of organized PT in my civilian life there was the fact that 1) I had to teach myself to cook so I could feed my growing family, 2) I realized that I'm a pretty damn good cook, 3) I loved eating what I cooked, and 4) I was depressed.  No this wasn't post-pardum depression.  This was post-Army depression.  I had a stellar career.  I was a DS...people knew who I was and now when I would go to functions it was all, "So who's your husband?"...like I wasn't a person of my own with my own achievements and dreams.  It.  Was.  Depressing.

I discovered that when I'm depressed or stressed I eat.  Not good.  When I joined the service at 23 I weighed about 120 pounds.  When I left the service I weighed 140 pounds.  Sure some of it was muscle, but many times when you're a DS you spend more time correcting the form of trainees doing PT than participating yourself and there's little "free time" to go off on your own and exercise.  Too busy a day and too long a week.  Being a DS rarely ends when you go home for the night. 

So after being out of the military for over 7 years something happened.  At the beginning of April I was at 163-ish pounds and the doctor told me my cholesterol was going up.  This is par for the course in my family.  I was only borderline, but my good cholesterol wasn't high enough.  Exercise would help.  OK...I'll put that on my long "to-do" list...whatever.

Then around the same time I noticed how big my arms were looking.  A common complaint from my sisters, but I never really noticed before.  I also began to notice that my clothes were getting way too tight for me and I had already sized-up a year or two before.  If I didn't do something soon I'd have to buy new clothes for the expanding new me.  While I have no sadness over a good clothes shopping spree, this wasn't the direction I wanted to be heading.  Additionally, when I would go clothes shopping all the cute stuff wasn't looking as cute on me anymore.  I was wearing clothes to hide my body.

Everyone would tell me that I didn't look like I weighed 160+ pounds, but what I really was doing was hiding it.  What mattered was that I started noticing.  The pictures I was in with my boys did not make me feel any better about myself.  I had gone from a fairly fit person to a 40 year old not happy about the way she looked.

You can say all you want about how television/media makes us feel like we have to be skinny.  Sure.  They show us some unrealistically skinny people and I don't want that.  What I want is to be happy with how I look and that meant dieting.  I'd tried dieting before and it didn't work.  Why would this be any different?  I wasn't convinced it would be, but I knew that I had to do something and I had to do something that worked.  That's when using the apps started.

A friend of mine posted that she was using LoseIt and wanted to know if any of her friends had the app.  I went to look at it and review it.  Great reviews and a great price.  Let's download this bad boy!...then I checked and saw that apparently I had downloaded it previously and NEVER USED IT!  Yeah, that's typical me....so I finally started using it.

I like techno-gadgets.  I'm no computer guru (I've got a tech-saavy hubby for that) but I do like boundaries.  I'm a military girl at heart and I like organization.  I also want something easy to use.  This was.

My pedometer was crap...crap...crappity crap.  It broke.  I replaced it.  It broke.  I said "screw it!"  I went looking for a pedometer app for my iPhone and found Striiv.  Odd name, but like LoseIt the reviews were great and the price was right.  Heck I take my iPhone everywhere anyway so why not use it as a pedometer and get credit for ALL the moving I do during the day.  The ones I purchased at the store were horribly inaccurate too (yes, I've worn two at once to compare).

I gave myself a goal of hitting 135 pounds by the end of October.  By the middle of June I had gone down to about 148 pounds.  I'd never been able to stick to a diet and as silly as it sounded these apps were really making a difference for me.  I did gain about 2 and a half pounds when I went on vacation and found counting calories rather inconvenient, but I should be able to make my goal or get quite close by my deadline.  I may even change it to 130 pounds.  I'm excited and, yes, I started noticing a change in my clothes.  It's not time for a new wardrobe yet, but the muffin-top is gone and the clothes fit properly.  I'm not hiding as much, but I'm not where I want to be....yet.

Will using these apps work for you?  I don't know.  What I do know is that you have to find something that suits you or it won't work.  If just cutting back on your portions works.  Great.  If keeping a log works.  Great.  This works for me.  Great.

I have friends and family that do fad diets.  Fad diets are bad diets in my opinion.  You will NEVER see me doing an all liquid diet to "cleanse" my body.  They don't work.  You think they are working, and you do initially lose weight, but it's not long term unless you make a change.  Fad diet.

Others cut wheat or carbs completely out of their diet.  Not gonna happen here...EVER.  I love me some pasta and bread and BEER.  Nope.  Not gonna happen.  Do you know what happens when you try stuff like this?  You'll lose weight.  You'll most likely also plateau and then wonder why you aren't losing anymore.  You can't just cut one thing out of your diet and expect miracles.  All you are doing is depriving your body of nutrients it needs.  I've been told "Oh after awhile I don't crave the candy, bread, pasta, etc anymore."  Great for you.  Do you know what most people will do during a crazy fad diet?  Binge.  That's not good for you or your diet.

If you want to avoid GMOs (genetically modified food) then the easiest way is to eat organic.  No, I don't because it's EXPENSIVE and we're a single income family.  I have my dream of retiring to a farm in Wisconsin and growing my own GMO-free food for eating and preserving, but right now it's not feasible.  I'd love to see our government deal with the GMO issue (which is still very new to me) but they can't deal with anything right now so the outlook is grim there.

I'm no certified nutritionalist.  Apart from my military and personal experience I can only tell you that when you do crazy things to your body, your body will do crazy things.  Don't starve yourself of what your body needs.  Give it what it needs in moderation and exercise.  The exercise can be ANYTHING!  Get up and MOVE!  If you think you're too heavy then stop shoving food into your mouth.  That was a hard lesson for me to learn because I didn't realize I was even doing it.

I know that many of my friends that have tried fad diets would just say "zip it, Cherie, " and that's fine, because the bottom line is if they truly believe that the diet worked for them (placebo effect or for real) then I'm happy for them.  Worried about the lasting effects, but happy that they are happy.  Just as my idea of what I want to weigh and look like may not be right for other people.  I wouldn't want it to be.  Just remember to be HAPPY with who you are.

Tomorrow I will post on LoseIt which was the first app I started using.  I don't know everything about the app, but I know what I love about it and I'll try to explain/share some of my favorite features and why I think it's so convenient.  I'll post on Striiv after.  They just updated the app so I'm relearning a few features, but it shouldn't take long.

I leave you with a little Foamy the Squirrel from Ill Will Press.  It's rather harsh and lots of swear words, but it does express very well my distaste for crazy diets (Weight Watchers is NOT a fad diet and it has proven effective for so many people although I have no experience with it).