MyPlate

This spring I got frustrated with my waist to hip ratio. Two factors weighted into this. First, I finally made the pants and jacket that Merle gave me the pattern & materials for at Christmas, and found that my hips and waist did not even come close to the same size on the pattern, which made making the pants a little difficult. The problem was that my waist was almost the same measurement as my hips, and that meant that they were three sizes apart. The second frustration was that all of my jeans and khakis were baggy in the hips and rear, yet tight in the waist. They just weren't comfortable.

My solution was to find a calorie-counting web site. MyPlate is a free food diary that I found. It has you enter in how much weight you'd like to lose per week, and then tells you how many calories you can have each day to meet that goal. Then, you easily enter in everything you eat, and it lets you know how many calories you have left. When I say you easily enter in what you eat, I mean it. It has nutritional facts entered in on almost everything you eat, like brand name store bought items, generics, even restaurant food, and calculates the calories for you. I highly recommend it to anyone with daily access to the internet. If you can get on more frequently, it will work even better for you, as then you don't just review what you ate, but will have that tool to tell you how much more you can have in a day.

I stuck with it for about 10 days, which was enough to get a good handle on how much I can eat each day. I was a little surprised at first, because I found I was eating about 350 extra calories per day. After a few days, I was able to stay with the plan, and was able to lose those extra pounds. I also found that when I ate in a restaurant, I went seriously over.

The next time I weighed myself, which was about 3 weeks later, I had lost 5 lbs. My jeans are now fitting nicely, except for my pair of low-rise jeans, which are falling off of me now. They were already loose, but now I think I'll just get rid of them.

I found that cutting down on calories makes you hungry at first. But once you know how many calories the foods you eat have in them, you can make healthier choices, and you won't be hungry any more, both because your stomach gets used to less, and because you get the knowledge you need to start eating lower calorie foods that will fill you up. Eating more frequently also helps, somehow.