Some 15 months ago, I decided I would try to get a handle on our monthly finances by keeping track of every penny I spent. I didn't know if I would find anything in there that would help me save money, but I figured that confronting the facts of daily spending might at least help make me more conscious of money. In the end, it worked. I decided there was a lot of money dribbling out through daily purchases of coffee and lunch up on campus. I resolved to bring my own lunches and snacks from now on and use the hot water heater I'd gotten for Noriko's office some Christmases ago. I also resolved to do more cooking at home, especially of large meals that could meet our needs for days. In fairly short order, I cut our food expenses by, I think, $300 dollars. I wasn't as conscious of other expenses, but by being generally more consciously penny-pinching we managed to actually save money at the end of the month. That, in turn has paid off in easier management of our property taxes and the recent emergency expenditure for replacing our sewer line to the street. Once the mindset kicked in, I didn't have to track our expenditures so closely anymore, but I'll be ready to do so again, should we need to.
I have now decided to take the same approach to my health. Like many men my age, I could stand a few tens of pounds. I made the transition from active teenager to more sedate adult without properly figuring out how to adjust my eating habits until I had gone much too high. In the years since my initial weight gain, I've managed to move up and down about 10 pounds, but I'm basically at equilibrium, much higher than I'd like to be. Most of the movement in my weight has been from periods of exercise (lots of biking in the summers and lots of walking in Japan). But I've been inconsistent in my exercise from season to season, which accounts for some of the weight fluctuation. But what I've really decided I have to do is get a handle on what I eat.
So I've joined a free site to help me do that called
DailyBurn.com. It has a variety of features, including some social media elements, but for my purposes it will mostly be a way to track my eating and exercise in the hopes that I become very conscious of food and can shift to a healthier diet. Basically, I do two things there. I have a page that lets me track my exercise and that calculates, roughly, the number of calories I probably burned in doing it. I have another page with a "Nutrition Log" on which I record everything I eat. I have never understood how to measure calories and while it is a very rough approximation here, when I type in a food, like, say, scrambled eggs, it gives me a number of choices from which I choose a description that is close to what I ate. That description lists the calories and the grams of fat, carbs and protein in the food. When I signed in, I got on the scale and logged in my initial weight. Then I set a desired weight for my goal. The site tells me how many calories I need to eat to sustain my current weight and then sets a range of calories that I should try to stay within if I want to lose weight (a couple hundred fewer calories than what it would take to sustain my weight). It also sets a target percentage ratio for grams of fat, carbs and protein to help me make decisions about food during the day (I'm having trouble eating enough protein according to their targets, but fat and carbs are easy).
My first day, I did well on exercise (bike ride and light hiking). Up to the end of the day, I was under my daily target calories. And while I knew in advance that this was true, it was the late night wine and snacks that killed me, put me over my target range for the day (by 50 calories, so not a disaster). So I know what I need to watch first and foremost, but it will be interesting to see what else I learn about timing of foods as I try this out for awhile. I'm also hoping that the childish sense of achievement that comes with recording the exercise that day will continue to be gratifying enough that I'll keep doing it.
In the meantime, Alton Brown's recent Good Eats episode (Live and Let Diet:
part 1;
part 2) in which he talked about how he lost 50 pounds in the last year will serve as my general eating guide. But his advice had some elements that are a little too hard. Only one alcoholic drink and desert per week? Ack!
