Renewing my Passover resolution
Last year, during Passover, I resolved to diet. And diet. And keep dieting, until I was not overweight anymore.
I had privately resolved at New Year’s to get more exercise, but joining a gym hadn’t really helped much. I felt healthier, but I didn’t get to the gym as much as I would have liked to, and I hated doing it. I had recently read The Hacker’s Diet by John Walker, which had given me hope that really transformative dieting – the kind where you go on it until you’re not overweight anymore – was even possible, and some ideas about how to do it. I downloaded a calorie-tracking iPhone application and started counting everything I ate.
Much to my surprise, calorie counting actually worked. It worked so well that since last Passover, I have lost 45 pounds.
Unfortunately, February-April is convention season. My diet has gone somewhat by the wayside and I’ve gained back 5 of those. That’s why I’m announcing here publicly: I am renewing my Passover resolution. Over the last year I did pretty well, but the work is not yet done.
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hey. what calorie counter are you using?
Excellent resolution! But does this mean you aren’t coming to Ibby’s 60th birthday thing?
Anna: I use Tap & Track Calories, which was a for-pay app but not very expensive. I have some issues with it and have also used Lose It! (free) in the past when T&T was not working for me. Neither app is perfect for my uses and I could probably write a whole other blog post on that subject.
Briefly – T&T has a really large food database, including restaurants. It also has a really handy “quick add” mode where you just type a number of calories (presumably off a food package). Also, it automatically scales your calorie budgets and exercise effectiveness for your weight, age, gender, and body type. However, I ran into issues where after collecting several months of data, the app got progressively slower and started crashing more. Possibly less an issue on a 3GS than on a 3G, which is what I have.
Lose It! is way faster and nicer-looking than T&T, but the UI is also a lot more cumbersome unless what you’re eating is already in its database (which isn’t huge). You have to actually create a new database entry for each food you eat, which takes a lot of work. Also, the calorie budgets it calculates seem high to me, although I don’t really know for sure. It also doesn’t have a way to manually adjust the budget by X number of calories, which T&T does.
You did an amazing job with it! You look really good.
@Phoebe: thanks!