Health – Page 17 – Auxiliary Memory

Lose It! versus MyFitnessPal

I want to lose weight and my Google research tells me keeping a food diary is essential to this goal. My wife said they taught her at Weight Watchers:

If you bite it, write it.
If you nibble it, scribble it.
If you drink it, ink it.
If you snack it, track it.
If you steal it, reveal it.
If you sneak it, leak it.
If you chose it, disclose it.
If you hog it, log it.
If you grab it, blab it.
If you indulge it, divulge it.
If you ingest it, you guessed it!
If you imbibe it, inscribe it!
If it goes in your smacker, it goes in your tracker!
If you lick it, bic it!
Grab your pencil before your utensil!

I’m not a joiner, so Weight Watchers isn’t for me. I’m a do-it-yourselfer, so I found a couple of apps to help me out.

Loset It! and MyFitnessPal are both great programs that help you lose weight by tracking what you eat. They both work from a web site and/or mobile device. Both have barcode readers to quickly look up calorie and nutritional content. Both help you track calorie intake and calories burned through exercise. Both programs are essential for fighting weight loss. Both programs have social networking features. Both are easy to use. Both work with iOS and Android. Both are free.

So how to pick one? Since they are free you could just start with both and see which one you liked.

However, my basic characterization is Lose It! is best for non-techies and MyFitnessPal is best for power users. Lose It! has an elegantly simple user interface that goes deep with features with the minimum of thinking. MyFitnessPal is a tiny bit harder to learn, but you can do more customization. MyFitnessPal gives more nutrient information and it’s barcode scanner seems to recognize slightly more foods, but it’s program menu structure is a touch more cumbersome than Lose It!’s menus. I like proportion control in Lose It!, but MyFitnessPal can be more accurate if you like math.

You sign up for each program and answer some questions about your height, weight, age and your weight loss goal. The program then tells you your daily calorie goal and what date you’re reach your weight loss goal if you follow their routine.

My goal is to get down to 180 pounds by July 25, 2013 by losing 1 pound a week. I get 2,271 calories to work with each day. I can eat more if I exercise more. For years I’ve felt like I was dieting all the time because I wasn’t eating all the food I wanted and had given up all my favorite junk food. But tracking calories closely clearly shows I was still eating too much. Well, duh! I’m still fat.

The Math of Weight Loss

I want to lose 1 pound per week. 1 pound is about 3,500 calories, so that’s 3500 / 7 days = 500 less a day. Lose It! asked my age, height and weight and told me 2,271 calories is what it takes for me to lose 1 pound per week, which means eating 2,771 calories maintains my weight, and eating more means my bodily universe expands.

It’s extremely important to honestly record everything you eat and use accurate proportions, otherwise you are fooling yourself. Don’t cheat, or you won’t loose weight.

Both programs work in almost an identical way. You track calories by adding food or exercise to a diary that’s broken down by:

Breakfast
Lunch
Dinner
Snacks
Exercise

You add calories to your diary by selecting food items by:

Scanning the barcode
Searching a database
Selecting from items you’ve already added
Selecting from complete meals you’ve already recorded

You decrease your calorie count by adding an exercise from:

Menu of exercises
Exercises you’ve already listed

You can use both of these programs from the web if you don’t have a mobile device. I don’t have a smart phone but I do have an iPod Touch that I carry with me everywhere. It’s the current generation with a camera, so I can scan barcodes. It’s extremely easy to keep a food diary with these programs and a mobile device. It’s pretty easy to just use the web version, but it will be a bit more work because you have to run find a computer after you eat each meal, or jot down what you eat during the day and enter it at night.

Here’s what the daily diary looks like for the two programs:

Lose It! (the program I use)

MyFitnessPal (the program I’m testing)

Neither program had physical therapy exercises on their list, so I used yoga as a substitute.

Once you’ve looked up most of the common foods you eat, recording a meal or snack in the diary takes seconds. I make up menus of my favorite meals and just add the whole menu with one click. I tend to eat a lot of the same meals. In Lose It!, breakfast is one item that’s a stored recipe, but lunch is from a restaurant.

Eating out is a big problem. No barcode to scan, or label info to read. Both programs lists items off of chain restaurants, but if you go somewhere else you have to make the best guess you can, or build an approximate recipe. This restaurant guide at CalorieKing is very helpful, but I wished they had photos of the food, with dimensions. At CalorieLab you can search 70,000 foods and 500 restaurants for similar meals and hope you get close. The FDA is rolling out a law that will require all restaurants with more than 20 locations to list nutritional information. It would be great if the menus had little barcodes to scan.

More than Counting Calories!

These programs are about more than counting calories, they provide overall nutritional information, like this my current information from Lose It! (I haven’t had dinner yet):

I eat too many carbs, and too much salt, and I need to eat more protein in relationship to the carbs and fats. I’ve seen all kinds of recommendations for the proper ratio for Carbs/Protein/Fat. Moderate is 50/25/25, but the Zone diet recommends, 40/30/30. I’m a vegetarian, and not a particularly healthy eating vegetarian so my protein is low and my carbs high. As I work on my diet I want to get close to the Zone diet ration of 40/30/30.

Not only do these programs help me watch calories, they help me watch the kind of foods I eat. When it comes to nutrition data, MyFitnessPal is superior to Lose It! Here’s what MyFitnessPal shows for Quaker Oat Squares cereal:

Here’s what Lose It! shows (but for 1 and 1/2 cups – Lose It! is easier to adjust proportions):

I find Lose It! a breeze to use and adapted to it quickly. I’m tempted by MyFitnessPal because of the extra nutritional information, but for now I’m going to stick with Lose It! When I want to know more I just add the foods to MyFitnessPal.

My wife and two friends use Lose It! This helps us stay on track and gives us stuff to discuss and argue. My friend Peggy nags me about my carbs. I nag her about her cholesterol and protein.

I’ve just started using these programs. I wished I had discovered them years ago, or I wished they had existed decades ago. Back then I tried keeping a food diary. It involved a pen, a notebook, and a nutrition fact book. It was tedious and I gave it up after a couple of days. I’ve adapted very easily to Lose It! But it’s too soon to see if I’ll stick with it for a whole year. However, I feel closer to dieting success than ever before.

JWH – 6/16/12 (Happy Birthday Susie)

UPDATE: 8/21/12

I ended up picking MyFitnessPal for my standard app. I preferred the look of Lose It!, but MyFitnessPal had way better barcode scanner and nutritional database. And being able to scan the barcode for information is just too handy.

After losing 10 pounds I started getting lazy with recording my food intake. I thought I could remember my good habits, but I was wrong. If I don’t record everything I don’t lose weight. I’m now back to using MyFitnessPal, but it’s hard. I try to tell myself I can’t eat anything unless I record it first. Or it’s not worth eating if I’m not willing to record it.

I hate having to control what I eat, but the act of maintaining a food diary helps that control.

MyFitnessPal makes it about as easy as possible to record what I eat, but it’s still a pain in the ass. I’ve even thought of eating the same meals every day so I won’t have to record.

JWH

Will Sugar Become as Evil as Cigarettes?

If you haven’t seen the 60 Minutes piece “Is Sugar Toxic?” Watch it here.

It’s inspired from this lecture, “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” from Robert H. Lusting, MD, that’s had over 2 million views on YouTube.

Health food gurus have been telling us sugar is toxic for generations, but now the scientific evidence is becoming overwhelming. Will we ban sugar like we’re banning smoking? Will eating sugar attain the same negative social stigma as lighting up? Will most people give up sweets to live longer? Should sugar abusers become targets for healthcare reform?

On the same day I saw the sugar report, I saw a news report that said young women are getting skin cancer at 8x the normal rate because of using tanning salons. They said this was especially true for women who have used a tanning bed more than 30 times. I asked several young women at work about this and they all said they had used a tanning bed more than 30 times. I asked them if they were going to stop. None of them said they would. One said, “Everything is bad for you, so what can you do?”

It took decades of public awareness messages to really put a dent in smoking. Even now with all the evidence and costs of smoking, lots of kids still take up the habit.

There are many big health food movements going on in our country right now, including vegan, vegetarian, eating local, organic, eating unprocessed foods, raw foods, and a zillion different weight-loss diets. Many of these diets still try to incorporate sweets and deserts, but Dr. Lustig is saying all sweets are bad. Other than having an orange or apple, you’re hurting yourself when you eat sweets.

The medical evidence he gives is rather overwhelming, and a lot of it goes back decades, with studies using very large test populations. I’m not doubting that he’s right. I’ve abused sugar all my life and now I’m paying for it. I could do testimonials for the guy. However, I just don’t see an anti-sugar movement catching on like the anti-smoking movement. But could it?

If you watch these videos you’ll see that a case could be made that sugar is actually more harmful than cigarettes. I can see an anti-sweets movement snowballing into something big. There is one thing about the anti-sweet case that’s different from cigarettes – sugar makes us fat. It’s very visible. Unless being fat becomes sexy, anti-sugar sentiment might catch on faster than the anti-smoking movement did. Taking decades to get cancer just isn’t the same scare tactic as you’ll get fat and won’t get laid.

It’s been obvious for decades now that Americans are getting fatter, but the assumption was we’re overeating everything. That’s a bit different than learning that sugar is the real problem. If they prove that sugar, and even artificial sweeteners, are the culprits, will we start to pay attention? Will Coca-Cola and pop disappear? And candy bars? And cakes, pies and cookies?

Dr. Lusting suggests that men can get buy eating 150 calories a day from sugar and women just 100, and that’s counting the hidden sugar. Is anyone that disciplined?

JWH – 4/4/12

The Soul Torture of Dieting

I need to lose weight for health reasons. I have arthritis in my back that makes it hard to stand or walk for long. I’ve bought Z-coil shoes that have shock absorbing springs in the heels that help tremendously. They make me look silly wearing them, but those bouncy shoes proves that my weight is related to my degenerative back disease. Even with the incentive of pain, for the life of me I can’t make myself lose weight!

Dieting is torture. Craving fun food is hormonal tyranny. Drug addicts argue over which drug is the most addictive, well I say the junk that’s the most addictive is junk food. I can force myself to go months without eating my favorite desserts, but then bam, something snaps, and my will power breaks. Dieting is the absolute test of mind over matter, and carbs beats the crap out of my gray matter every time.

Just because my mind lives inside this body doesn’t mean its cozy relationship affords any influence. Actually, I think it proves that the mind doesn’t just occupy the our skulls, but the whole hormonal system. Insulin affects my thinking just as much as any mind altering drug.

A carton of Ben & Jerry’s can bring me such happiness, energy and creative stimulation that it’s torture to resist. But I have resisted! I haven’t had any B&J’s for months, but the desire for it never goes away. But it doesn’t have to be anything as fabulous as ice cream for my hormones to torture me, sometimes I just crave an ordinary peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Just losing eight or ten pounds seems to trigger something that makes me lose all mental control and resolve.

I used to come home from work and stoke up on M&Ms, Coca-Cola, pies, cake, cookies and candy. All those calories would jazzercise my neural activities so I felt like doing after being burned out from work. When I diet I want to come home and veg out. In the last ten years I’ve discovered that a nap after work will rejuvenate me like my surgery loves, but it doesn’t do away with the craving.

Why isn’t eating simple and logical? Shouldn’t it be a Mr. Spock like decision. These foods will make me healthy, those foods are poison. Okay, I’ll take the poison. What sane person thinks that way?

Now scientists are telling us sugar is toxic. That’s probably perfect true, but I’ve been developing a tolerance to sugar my whole life, and I can take on some high levels of that poison.

There is something incredibly unfair that desserts are evil. We seldom get what we dream, but a carton of Ben & Jerry’s is something dreamy that’s easy to obtain. Of course, now that my teeth are going, well just one, but another is feeling poorly, I feel I should have listened to those warnings against sugar all those years ago. It’s like that old joke of Woody Allen, where his mother tells him that masturbation will make him go blind and he asks if he can do it until he needs glasses.

I’m afraid I’ll be needing choppers and still wanting to eat sweets. Or they’ll be cutting off my feet while I eat M&Ms. Why is it so hard to say no? On the news tonight they reported that there’s an epidemic of skin cancer among young women because they love tanning bed tans. Will that news stop them? What a silly question to ask.

Why aren’t we smarter? Or to ask it another way, why do our urges trump our brains, because we do know the answers, and we even believe what we’re told, but we still do the things bad for us like lemmings heading for the edge of the abyss. I suppose it’s the same thing with global warming – we can’t give up fossil fuels any easier than sugar or cigarettes. We’re like one cell animals heading directly to the stimulus we love the most. Becoming big brain beings didn’t overcome those basic instincts. What good is a neo-cortex when it can’t control the mammalian and reptilian parts of our brains?

Have they ever considered lobotomies for the lower brain functions? Or would being healthy and logical like Mr. Spock feel like being a zombie?

JWH – 4/2/12

What Republicans Don’t Know About Obamacare

Conservatives are running like a pack of wolves to pull down and kill Obamacare, while they dream of killing Medicare afterwards. What they don’t recognize is killing Obamacare will promote socialized medicine, not kill it. Obamacare was designed with Republicans in mind. It’s the free market solution to universal healthcare. When Republicans get their way and Obamacare is destroyed, the only solution left will be socialized medicine, and Medicare will become the model.

Most of the world has moved to universal healthcare, Americans are just slow to see that. It’s an idea that it’s time has already come, we don’t see it because we cling to outdated notions about capitalism. Wake up and smell the roses, capitalism is constantly evolving and it’s incorporated aspects of socialism to be more efficient. Sooner or later as universal healthcare becomes a success in all but the poorest countries, Americans will realize they have been left behind.

Obama and the Democrats designed the healthcare system we call Obamacare based on private insurance to appease the conservatives. Obamacare is the experiment to prove free market capitalism can do the job when it comes to universal healthcare. Killing Obamacare means killing the belief that there is a non-socialized solution. That’s okay by me, I never liked that idea, I always thought Medicare was a better model.

What’s going to happen is conservatives are going to kill off Obamacare and we’ll be forced to expand the scope of Medicare to cover the poor and uninsured. Most people with jobs will stay with private insurance – for a couple decades. Over time more and more private businesses will stop providing health insurance as more and more of the population will shift into a Medicare type system.

Sooner and later Americans will wake up and realize the rest of the world has a better solution. Obamacare was the Republican solution, they just don’t remember it.

JWH – 3/29/12

Z-Coil Shoes and My Spinal Stenosis

The arthritis in my L5 vertebra makes walking and standing pain inducing activities. To avoid pain I avoid walking anywhere but short distances.

I also keep pain under control by doing daily exercises my physical therapist taught me, but as things degenerate in my back my walking and standing stamina dwindles. I’m always trying to find things to help and this week I bought some Z-Coil shoes. I looked at them a year ago but was afraid to spend the money on something that might not work. Well, I’ve been avoiding meetings that require walking across campus because even short quarter mile walks can make my feet go numb for a day or two.

Because I don’t want to give up such walks I spent $189 (on sale) for some Z-Coil shoes and I was surprised by how much they helped. My feet tonight are no more numb and tired than than days I don’t have to walk across campus.

I can’t tell you if they will help you if you have back problems, but I can say they helped me. I tried to find testimonials on the web and didn’t find many. So here’s mine for what it’s worth.

Got to tell you though, they are weird looking, and they might even be dangerous if you aren’t careful. Read the warnings.

They come in many styles for men and women, even sandals. Newer models even try to hide the big spring, which act like a shock-absorber. The tension in my lower back started relaxing just hours after I started wearing these shoes. I’ve even been able to cut back on my anti-inflammation medicine. Oh, I’m not cured. Daily activity still wears on my lower spine but I’ve reduced that strain significantly with these shoes.

I can’t promise they will help you with your back problems. My guess is they won’t with muscle problems at all. I have degenerative discs that bone wear is pressing on nerves, so I have numbness, tingling and tension more than pain right now. I think these shock absorber shoes just reduce that wear somewhat – enough so I notice.

It’s something to consider.

JWH – 1/30/12

Update – 2/4/12

Before I tried Z-coil shoes I sometimes had weird sensations when I walked. Sometimes I’d feel like I was stepping in a hole or slipping on ice for a tiny fraction of a section. I assumed this happened when I twinged a nerve. After I started wearing the Z-coil shoes I haven’t had those sensations.