…I would be safe and sound

My landlady, who has been in the hospital for over a year now, is supposed to come home soon.

I’ve gotten very lax about setting the alarm at night (even though I still freak out over random noises), especially since it started to require that I bypass the panic button every time I turn it on. (I believe the panic button is probably out of batteries, but since I have no idea where it is, there’s not much I can do about that.)

My landlady, however, will care that it gets turned on. And once there’s regular noises in the house, I will also care, since the alarm being on will reassure me that they’re coming from people who were already in the house and not people who’ve come into the house in the night.

So my new thing this week is remembering to turn on the alarm before I go to bed at night.

Search Terms

Silly search terms people have used to get to my site is the low hanging fruit of blogging — everyone picks it because it’s easy. And I’m not one to blaze my own trails or buck a trend, so here’s my ’search terms’ people have used to get to my site post:

By far, the all time most common search term that’s brought people to my site? Is it ‘diet’? Is it ‘change’? Is it ‘ticky mark’? No!

It’s ‘fluffy puppies’. Seriously. You post one link to cute little puppies, and all that other, on topic stuff goes straight out the window.

The next most common search term that brings people to my site is ‘”if this were easy” blog’. And I’m not even on the first page of those results (though the technorati version of me is), so whoever put that in there was bound and determined to find me! Thanks.

Most disturbing though, are a number of terms in the nature of ‘bbw humiliation’ and ‘bbw water bloat’. Remember way back in Reason #1, I mentioned that BBW personals are scary. Those people are why. If only Non-zero chance hadn’t gone offline. I could finally wear the “I’m somebody’s fetish” t-shirt.

My new water routine

One of my things with drinking water is that I don’t like it too terribly cold.

The temperature it comes out of the tap is just about right. Unfortunately, the flavor it comes out of the tap is not right at all, so I have a water cooler with a filter thing on it.

The filter makes for yummy tasting water and not chlorine. Unfortunately, the temperature it comes out of the water cooler is not right, so I tend to leave it sitting on my desk for hours to warm back up.

Leaving it on my desk gets it nice and warm. Unfortunately, unless I remember to drink it at just the right point, it gets it too warm.

It’s a problem, as you can see. Not, like, oh my god, a Lehman Brothers is going bankrupt problem, but still, a problem of personal significance. Fortunately, as problems go, this one is not NP-hard.

My new routine is thus:

I filled a glass of water 2/3 full and left it sitting on the cooler overnight. By the next morning, it was very warm.

Filling the glass the rest of the way to the top with icy cold cooler water made it just about tap water perfect.

As soon as I fill one glass up to the top and take it away, I fill another glass 2/3 full and leave it sit there to get warm.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Thus, there is always a warm glass of water sitting on my water cooler, waiting to be topped up and made just right.

Sometimes the simplest problems have the most complex solutions… I mean … oh, never mind.

Making the neck thing useful

I downloaded a bunch of 10-15 minutes portuguese lessons in podcast form to listen to while I do the neck thing. Maybe that’ll make lying on the floor staring at the ceiling seem less tedious.

Reason #18: Because the only thing worse than a stretch mark…

…is an infected stretch mark.

Normally I go on about these reasons at some length. But really, what else is there to say?

Grr.

I know I’m not ‘really dieting’ and that I spent Tuesday night at a giant festival of eating lots of things, but it still irks me to see my weigh in number go up!

…I would keep my word

Read my lips. No new things.

Seriously, I need to not add anything this week and concentrate on actually doing the things that are already on my list. There are too many gaps in too many chains.

Reason #17: Because one also shouldn’t wish one had an eating disorder…

This is a genuine IM conversation log. Names have been changed to protect the innocent. And the not so innocent.
[15:55] theinnocent: how hard is it to be bulimic?  from the outside, it seems like it’d be easy.
[15:56] easy: Heheh.
[15:57] easy: God knows, I have had those thoughts.
[15:57] theinnocent: thank you! i thought i was the only one.
[15:57] easy: “It’d just be a little vomiting, I mean, really, why not?”
[15:57] theinnocent: i really hate vomiting, though
[15:57] easy: But then I remember that a) I hate vomiting and b) bulimia is an actual, like, disease thingy
[15:57] theinnocent: yes, it’s a very serious disease.
[15:57] easy: and also that its anorexics that are skinny
[15:58] theinnocent: oh, right.  damn.
[15:58] easy: Bulimics don’t lose that much weight, I don’t think
[15:58] theinnocent: cartoon bulimics do.

I’m in no serious danger of developing any kind of eating disorder, but you have to admit that it’s a little bit sick that I think about it ever. It’s one of the reasons I’m aiming for slow, longer term lifestyle changes. I just don’t think another ‘diet’ is going to work for me. At least not until I can mentally redefine diet back to what it’s supposed to mean, instead of what it’s come to mean.

In which only some things went to hell in a handbasket…

See that? I’m not saying it all went wrong. Mental progress!

So, last weekend I went out on a pub crawl with friends and didn’t crawl into bed until close to 4AM, then got up and went to this giant food event where I ate way too much in the stunning heat, and came home and napped for 2 hours (or, more specifically, napped for 1 hour twice) and this has completely fucked up my sleep schedule.

I’m finding it hard to get to bed and hard to get up in the morning and ARGH.

I have made it to the gym 2 days this week, but in the late afternoon, rather than the morning, like I should.

I’ve also not been doing my neck thing, as last week was that time of the month, and this week I just haven’t bothered. But I got grumped at by the chiropractor this morning, so I guess I should start that up again.

I missed a couple of days of writing, too, because Serena and Lance are trapped in a frigging hospital room and I can’t write them out of it no matter how hard I try because it’s not in the nature of Serena’s character to just leave her Little Sister alone in the hospital, no matter how hot the guy who wants to take her to dinner is. In fact, she’s probably less likely to do it for a hot guy, because that’ll just make her feel more guilty. Stupid characters and their stupid internal consistency issues.

I did do some work over the week on my good in concept less good in execution stories for my writer’s workshop that I didn’t end up going to anyway, because of extreme scheduling confusion and the need to go to the gym yesterday evening since I hadn’t gone yesterday morning. I might post those later.

And yesterday I forgot to eat a vegetable. I mean, there were some vegetables in some of the things I ate (tomatoes, mainly) but nothing your mom would look and call eating your veg. It was a find day nutritionally otherwise, just duh on the veggies.

Small Victories: Uninvited Guests

My landlady’s daughter came by today with a contractor to look at installing a wheelchair lift and fixing the shower in my bathroom. I ran into her as I was leaving to go to the gym and she asked if they could take a look at the shower.

I did not panic. I did not run downstairs and try to hide the fact that I haven’t done dishes in days. I did not say ‘no’.

I just thought about the fact that my apartment, while not spotless, is certainly clean enough for company, smiled and said, ‘Sure, I’m on my way to the gym, but I’ll leave the door unlocked.”

…I would know who I am

As I said on my calorie tracker comparison chart, they say you are what you eat, so this must be the path to self-discovery. Thus far today, I’m a spicy caramel apple. For breakfast. Yeah. Good thing I’m just tracking what I do eat and not trying to be on a diet, yo.

I’ve been tracking my calories fairly regularly for the last couple of weeks as I’ve been experimenting with the different calorie trackers, and now I’m making it officially this week’s thing. The goal is to track everything I eat throughout the day, every day. Some things, obviously, will be simply estimates in terms of volume and nutritional values, but I’ll make a good faith attempt on stuff I eat that other people (restaurants, friends, etc) prepare and measure the stuff I make myself.

I didn’t track my food yesterday, as I was at an event with more than 50 different bits of food to try and I tried nearly all of them. That sort of thing is going to be impossible to track, and I’ve decided in advance that I will still give myself checkmarks on those days as long as I don’t take one overblown meal as a reason not to track anything else I ate that day. It’s part of my meta-goal of learning to not give up quite so easily on all the other goals when they go a little bit awry.

Small Victories: Pants

I put on a pair of my favorite pants today, and they fit noticeably looser than they did last time I wore them. Not quite as well as they did when I bought them in November, but still, that’s a few months worth of crappy living reversed!

Ticker

I added a ticker and stickied it to the top of the site. I’d rather have it in the sidebar, but I’m not sure I can make it fit. I’ll play with it a bit and see.

I moved it to the sidebar. It doesn’t exactly fit — but it just sort of hangs out over the right edge in a moderately non-annoying sort of way, so I’m going to go with that for now. I’m on the lookout though, for something that will present a graph of my weight in a nice, side-bar appropriate sort of way. Unfortunately, I don’t seem to be able to insert script, so I need something that generates a remote image that I link to.

I’m using CCP for the ticker, since the tickers from DailyPlate don’t work on WordPress.

Other things I’ve learned from tracking my calories…

…besides which calorie tracker I’d prefer to use.

I eat a lot of carbs, a fair bit of fat, and not nearly enough protein. This is my conclusion from a little over a week of pretty heave tracking of what I eat. And the tracking itself has an observation effect on what I eat, so I shudder to imagine what the proportions probably looked like before I started tracking.

I think if I work on getting the protein up and the fat down, the carbs will take care of themselves somewhere in the process. I bought some very lean kolbassa, and a skinless chicken, as thing with more protein than fat, but what other food suggestions do people have with a good fat/protein mix? I like things that don’t require a lot of thought on my part, especially for working lunches.

Reason #16: Because one really shouldn’t hope one has a tumour

I harbor a secret (well, not so secret anymore) hope that one day my doctor will discover that I’m not actually astoundingly fat, I just have one of those giant, benign tumours in my abdominal cavity. They will take out the 25-plus pound monstrosity and I will instantly be thinner.

Sadly, I had an ultrasound to screen for potential gall bladder issues just a few months ago, and I have a feeling that if there was a giant tumour, it would have shown up.

Calorie Tracker Smackdown Cont’d

The larger comparison chart still exists, but I thought I’d do a quicker rundown of the pluses and minuses of each of the remaining candidates to help me decide which one I want to keep going with.

	CalorieCountPlus	DailyPlate	Gyminee
Absolute Best Thing	Recipe Analyzer!	Food Database, which is easily the most comprehensive of those I’ve tried.	Quick Add!
Other Good Things	Letter grades on your daily diet (they’ve proved kind of useful after all). Not quite as nice as gyminee’s category arrows, but still useful.Cleanest, least scrolling search results page. Cleanest display in general, especially for the basic food log.	Frequently used items and saved meals and workouts.% of daily values for fat, carbs, protein, and calories. Not as nice as gyminee, but still nice.	Nice search options.Easy to refine search with the serach box pre-filled and at the top of your results. The summary of whether you’ve met your goals on fat, carbs, protein and calories. Nice widget
Absolute Worst Thing	Profile page, which is either useless, or I can’t figure it out, one of the two.	Totally useless recipe analyzer.	Public profile page is pretty much useless.
Other Bad Things	Inability to edit foods in the database, or simply say ‘I ate two of these’ for user entered foods. Multiple clicks to add foods. Tagging vs. automated frequently used list.	Multiple clicks to add foods.Doesn’t save search term so you can clarify without retyping. Widgets cost $$$.	Moderately challenging recipe analyzer.Least items in database.

I believe I’m going to continue with the Daily Plate at this point. I like the usability of Gyminee, but the public profile is lame and the food database is also lame. CalorieCountPlus has its good points, too, but its key winner, the recipe analyzer, is something I can continue to use even if I use DailyPlate to track stuff. I’ll dump the recipe into CCP, and then copy the nutritional data over to the Daily Plate as a ‘user-entered food’ rather than a recipe (because DailyPlate’s recipe function is completely unfunctional, as far as I’m concerned.).

There’s one other site I’ve come across, “My Food Diary”, but I don’t think it offers public profiles at all, and it requires a credit card to even try the site. I might take a look at it and then cancel, just to complete my comparison chart, but I don’t think I’m willing to pay over $100 a year to track my calories, especially if it has no public profile. I’m going to go back to SparkPeople and FitDay to try and complete some of the comparison chart entries on them, as well.

Dropped from the list…

I’m dropping ‘cupboards and drawers closed’ from my list of things to track. I haven’t run across an open cupboard or door in my house in weeks.

I’m just declaring the problem officially solved. It can come back later if it becomes a problem again, but right now, it’s not worth the 10 seconds a day it takes to track it.

I’ve taken it off my RememberTheMilk To-Do list, and off my Joe’s Goals tracking list.

Yay for small victories!

Oops.

It’s 12:25 now and I’m not in bed.

I guess I can kiss that ticky mark good-bye.

…I wouldn’t carry this weight alone

I still haven’t picked a calorie tracker, so I’m not making calorie tracking my thing of the week as planned.

Instead, I’m going to pick weighing in every day as my thing of the week.

Some people argue for not weighing in more than once a week, and others not more than once a month, but I used to do the hacker’s diet thing and weigh in every day, and I actually found that I obsessed *less* about the weigh in differences when I was doing that than when I was doing weekly weigh-ins.

The everydayness of it meant that fluctuations were going to happen, and they didn’t need to be a source of stress, whereas when I’ve tried weighing in weekly, if I didn’t lose weight (even if that was because I had forgotten to weigh in until after I drank a glass of water), then I would stress out about that.

So, every morning, shortly after I get up, and before I get dressed or eat, I will weigh myself and enter that data into whatever software program I eventually choose for weighing in.

This morning, I weighed 361lbs.

Calorie Tracking Smackdown

So, for the past two days, I’ve been tracking Calories in FitDay, CalorieCountPlus and DailyPlate / Livestrong.

After two days, DailyPlate is the clear winner from that group — it had the most food items, it had a decent if busy public profile option, it tracked many of the things I’m interested in and it has robust options for frequently eaten foods and groups of foods. It’s not perfect — there are a lot of unneeded clicks in the workflow, and it’s waaaay overestimating the calorie burn on my workout — but of the three, it’s clearly the best.

I really liked the look and feel of CalorieCountPlus, but the lack of a public profile, the inability to easily adjust portion sizes and the relatively paltry food database did it in.

FitDay, well, it seems like it might be the best of the bunch — I especially liked the clean, non-myspacey look of the public profiles. But the devil is in the details, and on that front, there were just way too many annoying things about it, starting with the fact that I got logged out between every visit, even if I never closed the page. Little things that shouldn’t be broken, like the tab order when entering a new food, were also annoying. Plus, it doesn’t have much of a database of packaged / fast foods.

So, having given up on two of my options, but not quite in love with my remaining choice, I decided to add SparkPeople and Gyminee back into the mix. I opened accounts on both and attempted to catch them both up to my other calorie trackers.

SparkPeople is already out the door. It’s a shame, because I do like their add food interface quite a lot, but overall navigation was a pain in the ass, and it was just a little too perky and tied in with their ideas of what you should be doing for my tastes.

So that leaves DailyPlate and Gyminee in the running. I’ll keep with the tracking in those two for the next few days, and see how it goes. Comparison charts for all 5 sites are in the sidebar under “…I would know who I am”.