Milestone!

Milestone day! I'm officially down 10 pounds! 15.3 pounds to go. New target date is February 17.

The Technology

I've been playing around with a number of programs, all free. I started on my iPod Touch with a simple program called WeightTrack, a free app available in the iTunes store. It does one thing only and you can guess what that is by it's name. I've been using it on and off since July but I only started getting serious about this in January.

Yeah, January is the month everyone embarks on achieving the goals they set in their New Year's resolutions. In part, that's what I'm doing but I also am motivated more than that. This is a year of many goals for me but this Blog is dedicated to just one, getting healthy.

Around Christmas I discovered that LiveStrong.com has a feature called, "The Daily Plate." With The Daily Plate ("DP") you can track your weight, exercises and food intake. The best thing about DP is that it has every type of food I search for. From McDonald's, which I'm not eating anymore, to every packaged food you find at the grocery store. I recently discovered a feature that lets you enter your own items, which explains why I have a bit of a problem with multiple entries for certain items like 3 types of naval oranges with 3 different calorie counts. My attention to detail wants me to find the exact number of calories I'm eating but then I realize that 10 calories here or there out of 1,000 isn't going to make much difference.

I downloaded the LiveStrong app to my Touch and now, armed with a logging and tracking device in my pocket, I set out to lose 25 pounds on a 1,000 calorie per day diet. After 5 days I created a spreadsheet to track my progress and since I can't be satisfied with just a log, I created some forecasting formulas.

My projected goal is calculated based upon a 5 day rolling average of weight loss from the previous 5 days and then projected out to find the day that I will reach a BMI of less than 25. More on BMI later. After searching the Internet a bit to find the BMI formula, I also discovered a formula for BMR and WHR. More on those later as well. So my spreadsheet expanded and I'll be able to use this as I set new goals going forward. 

You'll see that not every day is 1,000 or under. I discovered that I can maintain my weight loss if I keep it under 1,300 calories per day, although I still shoot for 1,000 each day.

Now I have to look at my spreadsheet and figure out how I could lose 1.4 pounds in a day but my body fat percentage went up from 27% to 28%. Must be an error in my formulas.