Welcome to the club, DCTrekkie. Absolutely add me as a friend! I’m vsquist on Spark. I think you’ll like the site. There’s people of all ages and sizes, and some really great success stories. It is a bit boring to add foods, but once they’re in there it’s really simple to add it to your nutrition tracker for the day. You can do food groupings too, so if, like me, you tend to eat the same thing for lunch every day, you can make a food grouping and you don’t have to enter each food individually every time. Best of luck!
Maybe I’m anal, but I like that part. I also like Googling for the nutrition info online. I tried adding you as a friend and I couldn’t. Do you have a SparkPage set up?
I also balance my checkbook to the penny every two weeks. 
Aha, I think that I do not have a spark page yet. I’ll do that tonight.
Unfortunately, I live in a town that is notable for its rich variety of excellent and well-attended independent restaurants… so precise nutrition info is hard to come by. We’ve even kept Starbucks out, if you can believe it.
i think i’ve added everyone except sattua, if i’ve missed anyone let me know. It looks a lot better than the other site I was using, although i’ll have to look at the meal and exercise planners when i’m a bit less tired.
For me, I don’t mess with the meal planners. I plug in what I eat and keep track of it that way.
YMMV, of course.
Sattua, I don’t think you have to be exact, but you should be careful on your portions. What they serve in most restaurants is WAAAAAY more than someone should be eating at one sitting.
I’m using my food scale more too.
I don’t think SparkPeople is going to work for me. It doesn’t have the vaguest idea of the calories in a chicken enchilada (unless it’s part of a frozen meal, complete with rice and sour cream sauce), and it’s trying to boss me around with my exercise, when all I want to do is log the two hours of shinkendo I’m about to attend.
Oh well.
After free-living for a few months, it’s time for me to get back on the straight & narrow. Changes so far:
- Eating oatmeal for breakfast again. Goodbye, peanut butter toast, it was good while it lasted.
- Trying to get in five servings of fruit & vegetables plus two servings of skim milk a day.
- Trying to drink… less.
- To my twice-weekly, two-hour shinkendo sessions, and the one-hour, once-weekly bellydance class, I’m adding two 90-minute yoga sessions in June when the next set of classes starts. I also tend to take a couple 30-minute walks a week, and do about an hour of carrying-heavy-stuff-around gardening on weekends.
I was 175 last time I weighed myself. I’m sure I’m at at least 180 now. I’m female. I’m 5’6".
well, i did my first weigh-in this morning, 365.8lb, looks like I’ve got a long way to go.
Sattua, try Googling the info on your chicken enchilada…SP will allow you to manually enter nutrition info.
As far as the Fitness part, I log in what I do and how long I do it. Yesterday was supposed to be an exercise day, but I had an appt. Today is not an exercise day, but I’m going to the gym anyway. As long as I get in my minutes of cardio per week, I don’t really care if I go the days I’m “scheduled.”
You can change the days you’re scheduled to exercise (right next to “see report” on the cardio tracker, click on “change”) and also enter workouts manually if they’re not listed. I change the days I work out pretty much weekly, to accommodate other stuff I want to do. For example, yesterday was supposed to be my day off because I had an evening meeting but it was canceled so I added yesterday back in and gave myself Saturday off instead because I have a bunch of family stuff going on. I do struggle sometimes with finding what I’m looking for in the nutrition tracker and trying to enter it on my own, so I just do the best that I can. It has worked out fine so far.
Good luck on the first day of your new life, DCTrekkie!
I’m at 170 for the fifth day in a row now. That puts me only two pounds over the “normal” BMI range. It’s so close I can taste it.
Thanks
Cut off a finger, that ought to do it, I’m sure you can manage with 9
If you don’t mind me asking, is that your final target, or just your current target. Either way, good luck.
You might check out the calories listed for foods on Calorie Count. Perhaps by mixing and matching the best features of these two sites, you can come up with a way to make the calorie tracking less tedious.
I’d stopped tracking my calories for a couple of months, and also quit measuring my peanut butter (ahhhhh peanut butter), so it’s back to the regime for me.
I did join Spark People but honestly I’m so used to how Calorie Count is set up that trying to sort through SP features is not worth the time for me. But I’ll continue lurking in this thread and following along everyone’s journey as I return to my healthier habits.
Thanks! 168 is my current target. My next goal will be 160, and then if I can hang onto that, 155. I’m not too confident that I’ll ever reach that final goal—it’s so much harder to lose when you’re close to your goal—but honestly, if I can get into the healthy BMI range and be fit, I’ll be happy.
ETA: This was in response to DCTrekkie.
Thanks for the balloons, ivylass.
I didn’t get my exercise done yesterday but I had to attend a funeral service, go to a doctor’s appointment, run some errands and put in a few hours of work. I did get a little walking done during my errands. I also did some crying, not sure how many calories that burns but it wipes me out so I think it must burn some.
I also ended up eating only two meals but both were bought at “restaurants” so I was sure I would go over my calories but when I put them in the calories counter I was in the middle of my allowed calorie range.
As for keeping myself from eating, I have been cleaning out my garage and house so that keeps me too busy and my hands too dirty to even want to eat.
Okay… now that I’m less tired and contentious (smile), I’ve gone back to SparkPeople and entered my information. I have made a SparkPage, so I should be able to friend people and vice versa… my username is cattrees. I am looking up nutrition info on FitDay, but only recording calories in SparkPeople.
Gee, it really wants to give me lots of credit for the shinkendo. 720 calories an hour? Yikes. I would have guessed more like 300-400. We take water breaks, and senpai takes time to demonstrate things, correct our form, etc.
What’s shinkendo? Is that a martial art?
I’ve noticed the calories burned on SP seems to be higher than what the machines at the gym say. I figure as long as I stay within my calorie range and exercise at least three times a week, I’m on the right track.
Yeah. Non-competitive Japanese sword study. There’s lots of focus on form and safety… and oh yeah, eventually they’ll let me have a real katana 
Yay! I lost another pound last week, pretty good going considering the number of things I’ve eaten that I shouldn’t have. I would have liked to lose more, but I am happy enough not to have gained.
So I’m really happy - I finally made my 10% goal! That’s a total of 18.6 pounds since September, and I’m in the 160s now. I know this is way slower than a lot of you in here, but I’m pretty pleased.
As long as it’s going it doesn’t matter how long it takes. Well done
Great job, guys! I agree that any loss is a good loss. I do think I hold the record for the world’s slowest weight loss (I’d like to blame my thyroid here, but I won’t. My thyroid does not make me eat and drink too much or not exercise enough). It has taken me since October of 2006 to lose 20 pounds. Well, I did lose 17 and then gain seven back and lose 10 again. I hope to be joining you in the 160s very soon, Helen’s Eidolon.