MFP

I have counted calories since I was about 14 years old. It's been both a good and a bad thing, and although I haven't done it every day since I was 14, I would say I did it a large portion of those days. Going back through old boxes I always find a food journal with calorie counts in it.

I'm at the point where I can read through these journal now and feel a bit sad at how little I used to eat and how miserable I was doing it. Regardless of how it was, I knew I had to do it. It started out as education -- a way to understand how much I was actually eating when I was overweight. This is one of the first things that nutritionists (like my sister!) tell their patients to do to lose weight: start keeping track of everything you eat.

In the beginning, it was good. I realized I ate a lot more than I needed and started cutting back. I was 14. Dieting was something everyone did, right? Well, like the typical type-A perfectionist I was, I didn't half-ass the calorie counting. I made sure I did it "perfectly".

Some examples of the obsessive perfection were weighing/measuring all food, looking up nutritional info on multiple sites and averaging them to get the most accurate outcome, and making sure not to eat anything I didn't know nutritional information for.

Eventually, as the eating disorder started taking over, counting became more and more important and obsessive. However, sometimes I believe that not counting would have been worse. When I didn't count, I drastically overestimated how much I was eating so that I wouldn't gain weight. At least with calorie counting I could eat as much as I would allow myself without low-balling it. Now, I'm not suggesting this is a good thing, but for a brief time when I tried not counting calories, it was much worse.

As I've recovered, one might think that I would have stopped counting as much. The truth is, I haven't -- I'm just less obsessive about it. I still need a certain amount of control and knowledge of what I'm eating. So I still "count" which is defined much more loosely now then it used to be. I weigh and measure foods as well, but I can eat out at a restaurant without worrying now.

The reason I wanted to talk about calorie counting today is that I believe it's actually helpful for me. Now its not just calories that I like looking at, but how much protein I get, how many carbs and how much fat. I can spot trends now based on calories and macros. I can correlate it to cravings, mood swings, energy levels and so on. I like the knowledge. I think knowledge is usually good as long as its not misused.

My calorie/macro counter/food journal of choice has now switched to an online one: MyFitnessPal. I no longer fill up journal after journal of paper -- but an online one instead. It has cool apps to make charts of things like protein or net calories over periods of time which I also like (cause I'm a nerd!).

It has a feature that tells you how many days you've logged onto it in a row. Today marks my 500th day, which was why I wanted to write about this. It's a lot of days, but something I do so naturally, and hopefully healthily now, that I think of it as an accomplishment.