Weight Watchers vs. MyFitnessPal

I've been doing Weight Watchers lately. I haven't told most (hardly any, actually) of my local friends about this, because I always feel private about trying to lose weight. It's also ridiculously boring for other people to hear about, I think, and sort of tedious and typical.

I told one local friend other than Ed - the one I'm closest to. I told her I wasn't going to tell anyone else, not because it was a secret (I didn't want her to feel obligated to keep it as a secret, because that's always a burden and this isn't very important), but just because I didn't want to talk about it with anyone else. But it's good to have a couple of friends for support.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. Websites.

Weight Watchers is pretty cool these days. I just do it online. They still have a program based on "points" which are calculated for a food based on its protein, fiber, carb, and fat content. In reality, it works out to about 1 point per 40 calories, though WW doesn't want you to think that way. Non-starchy vegetables cost no points and, even more astonishingly, neither do any fruits (except avocados).

You get a daily points allowance, and then you also get this weekly pool of points that you can use for extras. You can have a few of these every day or you can have them all at once if you want to.

I really like the program. They reduced the points totals to allow for what they think will be typical fruit/veg consumption, and the free fruits really encourage you to snack on fruit, vs. forcing you to choose between a banana and a 100-calorie snack pack of mini-oreos, where most people will choose the oreos, which is clearly not the way to go for overall health and well-being (or, most likely, satiety). And I like the pool of weekly points - it really helps me manage social occasions and things like that.

Recently, the site myfitnesspal was recommended to me. It is a dieting site based purely on calorie-counting (or you can track whatever nutrients you want). Unlike Weight Watchers, it's free (ad-supported). For about the past week I have been logging my food intake in both places.

The calorie budget that myfitnesspal gives me based on my various statistics and desire to lose 1 lb per week basically comes out to be the same as what WW gives me if you include the weekly points. (WW "requires" you to eat all of your daily points, but you can forgo the weekly ones if you wish.) Of course, WW lets me eat fruit on top of that allowance, and myfitnesspal does not. Myfitnesspal doesn't have any software-supported way for me to bank calories to eat on other days, either, or anything like that.

However, myfitnesspal does have a truly excellent food database, the easiest one to use that I've encountered since the tragic demise of BalanceLog. In addition to their database, users can enter foods for anyone to use, and other members can verify that the nutrition is correct. If 43 people agree that this entry for McDonald's fries is right, you can pretty much trust it.

In addition to these aspects, myfitnesspal has a community aspect. There are message boards, but, more importantly, it has the whole "friends" thing from Facebook. That part of the site is almost a direct clone of Facebook - you get a news feed of your friends' updates, which (depending on their preferences) will include posts when they log their food for the day, update their weight, etc. So if you have friends on the site, you can get a ton of social support. Also, if your friends' food diaries aren't set to private, you can go see what they ate every day, which is fun if you like that sort of thing.

I'm considering abandoning WW (esp. since it costs money) and just using myfitnesspal. I want to continue enjoying the social aspects of myfitnesspal in any case, and it would be nicer to only be using one site rather than two.

What's a little sad for me is that I really do like and prefer the WW program itself. I like the points and the weekly extra points and the free fruit and all of that. It sort of turns the whole thing into a game rather than being more of a dreary regime. It takes things slightly out of the realm of reality.

But I feel like I can only really enter into the playful fantasy world of WW if I don't at the same time do actual calories. They don't layer well for me.

To be clear, I think these systems are pretty much equivalent in terms of the bottom line of encouraging the energy deficit that leads to weight loss - it's just a matter of what works better psychologically. And of course, one doesn't need to decide once for all time. But those are the issues I'm pondering right now.

Grainlessness Update

So, I am still doing the grainless thing, though not with perfect adherence. I've decided to add whole wheat pasta (2 oz. at a time only) as well as brown rice (small quantities, like 3/4 cup) to my diet. And I've been exercising somewhat regularly, though not quite as much as I'd like.

According to the scale at the gym last night, I am down 10 pounds from where I started in early June. I was only wearing my bathing suit (and Crocs) when I weighed myself, which may be less than I generally wear, but I was dripping wet from my shower (I hadn't dried off at all since I was headed straight for the pool anyway), so that may have balanced it out.

Despite having lost 10 pounds, I feel unsure that this way of eating/living is actually going to result in a lot of weight loss. I don't know why that is, except that weight loss is generally slow if you're doing it the way I do, and so it's hard to be sure you're really seeing a trend and not random fluctuations.

But I'm feeling really, really good about it. For the first time pretty much ever, it's crystal clear to me that I feel better when eating this way than I do when I overeat (especially in an unplanned way). I feel kind of strong and good inside. I hope that it lasts. I am really trying to think of this as a lifestyle change and not a diet to lose weight, so...well, we'll see.

My Cunning Plan

Since I began dating Ed, I have gained back the 65 lbs that I lost a few years ago.

When I told him this the other night, he asked if he had in some way influenced this, and the answer is, yes, but not in the way one might think. Ed does not ply me with bonbons or keep me from exercising. But I only lost all that weight before by concentrating on weight loss a whole lot, and Ed has been a lot more fun to concentrate on. As well, being in a relationship has made me happy and content in the usual way that often leads the newly married to gain a bit of weight.

I don't hate being fat that much. I'm not too self-conscious about my body, for instance, and Ed doesn't seem to mind (so the whole "how will I ever find someone to love me" whine is not really relevant, if it ever was). I am able to find clothes that I'm satisfied wearing. I don't go around feeling fat all the time in some kind of oppressive way.

But it isn't healthy, and it does make me much less fit than I could be otherwise, and I do notice those things. And, the thing is, I could kind of accept it, except that I keep gaining weight inexorably and I don't know where it would stop. It's easy to fall into the trap of feeling accepting of the current weight "as long as I don't gain any more" and ending up like the proverbial frog in the pot of slowly boiling water. (It is not true of frogs, by the way, that they will allow themselves to be boiled, however gradually one raises the temperature.)

I've tried losing weight here and there, but never been able to stick with anything longer than a few days. I seem to encounter a brick wall of non-caring pretty soon, and just revert to whatever I was doing before.

But I actually feel motivated right now, as though enough is finally enough, perhaps. (We'll see.) And I have devised an experimental weight-loss scheme, and this is the fourth day, and I can sort of imagine myself sticking with it.

In short, I have given up grains, potatoes, and sweeteners. This means basically bread, noodles, rice, cereal, french fries, anything battered, tortilla chips, sodas, and so on.

I am excluding grains that are invisible and inconsequential - I will not trouble myself over whether a sauce was thickened with cornstarch or whether spaghetti sauce contains some sugar or corn syrup.

Whatever I do for weight loss needs to be compatible with eating out and with convenience foods (like pasta sauce in a jar), and this diet seems to accomplish that. In restaurants it basically looks like a low-carb diet, but I have no intention of restricting any other carbs: it's open season on fruit, milk, vegetables, and beans, for instance. So this diet will probably end up being somewhat low in carbs, but not specifically by design.

It hasn't been easy so far - the things I've given up are some of the Very Best Foods - but I've managed it, and I think it's getting easier. It's too early to say whether I'm losing weight doing this, but I do find that a lot of my meals are the same size as before except without the starches, which would obviously cut quite a few calories.

I am attracted to the utter simplicity of this idea. And, of course, I have (probably fantastical) hopes that this one particular sacrifice will, by itself (or in conjunction with a moderate amount of exercise), result in some meaningful weight loss, without my having to strenuously guard my diet in other ways. (By "strenuously" I mean something more than just "no, two bunless bacon cheeseburgers is not an appropriate dinner").

I may allow myself one meal with grains per week, because I really do hate to give up some of the restaurant food that I love. But I'm not sure if I want to do that this first week or not.

Anyway, I'll try to post about how this works out. If you never hear anything about it from me again, chances are I lost interest and jumped back in the steamy frog-pot.

Health at Every Size

Right now I am reading Health at Every Size by Linda Bacon. Apparently Health at Every Size (HAES) is a general movement, of which Bacon is a part. The book essentially argues that you are unlikely to succeed at intentional weight loss over the long term, and that trying to do so might harm rather than improve your health, but that you can improve your health regardless of your size by other measures.

I haven't finished the book, so I won't try a full review, but although it's written at a fairly low level (similar to diet books in general) and is slightly polemical, I have only minor quibbles with what I've read so far. Bacon is an actual researcher with the kind of credentials you'd want to see. There are hundreds of citations throughout the text so that if she asserts something, you can easily investigate if you're so inclined. I think the book is worth reading whether you end up agreeing with its conclusions or not.

Bacon and some other researchers who are much more supportive of weight loss did a study in which they enrolled 78 (I think) overweight women and put them into two groups. Both groups met once per week for six months (divided into smaller support groups of 9 or 10 people), and then once a month for six months. One group followed a HAES approach and the other was a standard diet and exercise group.

After two years, neither group had lost any weight, but the HAES group had several measurable health improvements (things like fitness, cholesterol levels, and blood pressure), while the only statistically significant change among the dieting group was self-esteem, which went down.

This was, of course, only one study.

Overall, I find this approach appealing. I have lost a lot of weight (over 60 lbs) intentionally in the past, but I've regained a lot of it over time. I know that the key to maintaining the loss is to get a lot of exercise and maintain a constant focus on it, and I can't seem to do that at all right now - especially the "maintain focus" part. I can't seem to do anything systematic about my weight for more than about a week at a time.

What I can do (and I'm just starting the actual recommendations part of the book, so I'm now just writing about my own experience) is exercise and include more fruits and vegetables in my diet regardless of what or how much I am eating in general. And for now that's working out pretty well. I've got Ed going to the gym with me three times a week (which I generally enjoy a lot even though it's easier not to go) and I'm regularly eating pretty high amounts of fruits and veggies. (I'd say I average about 5 or 6 servings a day, which is not super high, but is at least within recommendations.)

I don't know. If I continue to inexorably gain weight I may have to revisit the idea of intentional weight loss. But if I can maintain some weight or other and increase my fitness to a normal level while eating a somewhat healthy diet, that might be a better approach for me.