Well, it’s time. Despite being fairly active, I am still a good 30 pounds overweight and I need to do something about it. The first key, I think, is to simply keep track of what I am eating. My parents have done this and keep a little notebook, but I am not a notebook-toting type person.
However, I do like my gadgets. So my thought is to get a relatively cheap PDA and find a good diet tracking program. A quick search over at download.com showed over a dozen such programs for the various mobile OS’s (i.e., Palm vs Microsoft).
Has anyone tried this, and which program(s) worked well for you? Thanks in advance for anyone who has good info!
I know I’m showing my age – but that’s not the first thing to come to mind when I see “PDA.” I was expecting something like “My SO won’t kiss me in public because I’m so fat.” Well, actually, I was expecting “My SO promised we could do it in a hotel lobby if I lost 15 pounds,” but let’s not go quite that far into my brain, 'kay?
Sorry, don’t have any actually helpful commentary here.
I guess I’m showing my geekness. To me “PDA” is “Personal Digital Assistant”, and a generic term for all those little hand-held devices, such as the Palm Pilot, the iPaq, etc.
What else might “PDA” stand for? “Professional Digimon Association”? “Presidential Dribbling Assistant”? That last one’ll be a very prestigious title one day when we finally elect an ex-NBA star as president.
They still used this term when I was in high school 10 years ago, so you can’t be showing too much age
Ponder Stibbons, look on ebay for a handspring visor deluxe. You can get them fairly cheap, less than $40 in many cases, and they’re good for newbies. I bought one over the summer to see if I liked PDAs, and I do. I’ll probably be buying something better this year.
I used a desktop but I just used microsoft word to write down what I ate and how many calories it had. Excel might work better though, but word is perfectly fine if you are just writing down what you ate, when you ate it and its caloric content. You don’t necessarily need a diet program, but I’ve never used one so I don’t know what they can offer.
If you have a PalmOS PDA, the answer is The Hacker’s Diet. It’s simple, easy to use, and while I was on it I dropped 15 pounds or so (and my F-I-L dropped over 30 pounds). I only stopped because I switched to a PocketPC and the tools aren’t available on that platform.
In fact, I’ve been working on and off on programming a replacement on the PocketPC.
Anyway, the power (IMO) is in the charting. When you see that trend line going down, it is incredibly motivating. The basic idea is that you enter your weight daily and see where it’s trending over time. If you want to lose weight you need to decrease you calories and shortly you’ll see the trend line going down. If you want to gain weight, you can make the line go up. And once you’ve reached your ideal weight, you keep tracking your weight to make sure it doesn’t go up too high.
His idea is that if you weigh the wrong amount (too heavy or too light), your internal “eat watch” is broken. You can’t tell when you’ve eaten the right amount. So you need a mechanical watch to help.
The guy tells his personal story here in short form. You can read the free book online or download a .PDF file. He created AutoCAD (the software) and the company (AutoDesk) that resulted. He looked at himself one day and wondered why he couldn’t manage his weight. EatWatch was the result.
Basically he wanted to spend no more than 15 minutes each day dealing with his weight. So he developed the Eat Watch and a simple calisthenics program. And apparently he’s succeeded.
When I was using the program successfully, I was hungry. Very hungry. But I didn’t care. The hunger was a sign that I was burning calories. I highly recommend it.
Oh yes - I use Diet and Exercise Assistant for the Palm OS from Keyoe, and I’ve raved about it here before. It’s not free; it cost me about $20. But it helped me lose 25 pounds, and it’s about to help me lose 15 more (some of the previous pounds came back, but not with too many reinforcements).
It’s grand. I love it - it’s a good motivator. And, as with simply writing things down in a notebook, it really makes you conscious of what you’re eating. You tend to question things a lot more when you have to track everything that crosses your lips, and it helps me stay on the diet. I’m always totalling how many calories I have to “spend” when I use my program. It also takes a lot of guesswork out of things as it comes with a large library of common foods and includes lots of restaurants, too.
Yes, I am hungry a lot when I’m dieting, and it’s not a feeling I care for. But you adjust - in a few weeks, I’ll get full on a lot less. And that’s a big plus - it’s another motivator. I highly recommend it.
The program I have runs on the old Palm OS (version 4, I think), but there is a new one for the latest version. However, I doubt you’ll have to spend a lot of money to get something that’ll work for you.
I love it. I don’t think you’ll regret it, either.
