Carbohydrate Overload, Protein Deficit

I'm on my seventh day of trying out dailyburn.com and here's what I'm noticing.

Logging in everything I eat every day has, indeed, made it much easier to avoid snacking. I start the day aware that I have 2200 to 2500 calories allotted to me. It becomes like a game. I want to be sure that I have calories left at the end of the day so I can enjoy a glass of wine. So I've been eating really healthy foods during the day. Fruits and berries and oats (in various modes) at breakfast, lean sandwiches and veggies at lunch and smaller portions at dinner. So far I've always had caloric room for wine and I've gone over my target calorie range only once. In fact, as one can see in my Jan. 27 nutrition log above, I tend to finish the day below the lower end of my calorie target range. In the course of this, I've found that a glass of wine at the end of the day is more important to me than dessert. So I've pretty much cut desserts out entirely in this first week and I haven't missed them.

But dailyburn.com also sets a desirable ratio of carbs to fats to proteins and I'm finding it impossible to get green check marks (designating hitting the target range) for all three. The problem is proteins. I've been eating a ton of fruits and vegetables and—it feels unfair—they get registered as carbohydrates (which I tend to think of in terms of grains). So I'm usually either on the upper limits of my carb range or over. I have managed to keep the fat intake to hit their range, but I fall substantially short of the proteins. The 27th was one of my closest days on the protein range and I hit only 60% of my target. I had scrambled eggs for breakfast, a turkey and avacado sandwich for lunch, a fat free yogurt for afternoon snack, a beef and tofu stir fry for dinner and a cheese quesadilla for evening snack and that's all the protein I could get. Other days, I've just diced up half a brick of tofu and eaten it with soy sauce and dried bonito flakes and I can barely budge the protein meter. This will take much more work.

My friend Ron advised me to eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper to keep my weight in control. I've been trying to follow his advice by eating a lot of things at breakfast and lunch, a kind of grazing approach. But what I'm grazing tends to be so low in calories that by the time I hit dinner, I tend to be at the 800 to 1000 calorie level. Since I've been ending the day in the 1900 to 2200 range, that means that half the calories I eat in the day come after dinner. And that clearly isn't the way to go if I want to shed some pounds. So this eating thing is still going to take a lot of work.

The other thing I do on the site is log in any exercise I do that day. This has been the most fun. I've tried in the past to set up spread sheets for tracking the exercise I do because seeing the accumulation is the reward. What this site does extra for me is estimate how many calories I've burned, which is a bonus (again, I've never had a clue how many calories any exercise is burning). It also has a pretty good library of video tapes showing various exercises I can do with our exercise ball, etc. The stats on the left show my exercise for the same day as my nutrition log above. I couldn't get a convenient screen shot that would show the exercise that achieved this burn, but I biked 6 miles and did 30 minutes of yoga. While logging my food is a little nerve wracking, logging my exercise is like  the lab monkey hitting the pleasure button. That means that in sensing the good feelings that will come from exercise (not the endorphins, but the whatever those things are you get when you get praised), I am more inclined to do it. So this is a win!

I don't feel like upgrading to pro yet. The pro version is mostly enhanced social network stuff and integration with your iPhone and whatnot. There is better tracking of nutrition (all those carbohydrate fruits and vegetables would pay off in great fiber stats), but I don't need those. With just what I have on the free version, I've dropped 3 pounds in the first week (low hanging fruit, I know, but 3 nonetheless).