Stop fooling yourself and start tracking!

Just because you eat “healthy foods”, it doesn’t mean that you have the right to eat as much as you want—take it from me, “Queen of Healthy Foods”!  After slowly packing on about 20 pounds in a year, I finally get it and I can say without a doubt that it’s not just my underactive thyroid gland that’s causing all of the problems!  During the end of 2009, I realized that I have to take control and stop leaning on the “my-thyroid-is-screwed-up crutch”; and make some real hard core changes to help balance out my underperforming thyroid gland.  One of the biggest changes was I started back tracking the foods that I consumed on a daily bases.  You know the saying, “calories in equal calories out.”  Just in case math isn’t your thing, this means that the more calories you eat, the more weight you gain or lose because for every 3,500 calories you will either gain or lose 1 pound!

3,500 calories = 1 pound

So, there’s no trick or special secrets to losing weight, it’s just simple mathematics (along with exercise)!  No matter whether you are on the Jenny Craig®, Weight Watchers®, or Biggest Loser plan, or just working with your own personal trainer, they all follow this one simple principle, a controlled diet with proper exercise will result in weight loss and a healthy body.  So, if you don’t have the opportunity to try those programs, then you can achieve your weight loss goals with just a cellphone or a computer!  That’s right, it’s just that simple.

There are a plethora of online tracking tools that are FREE!  Some are better than others, but for the most part they all do the same things.  I recently started using MyFitnessPal to track my daily diary and it is awesome!  What I like about this tool is that it has an extensive database that includes lots of foods and remembers my most frequently eaten foods to make it easy to add those foods again in my log.  Also, I can track trends to see my progress over a specified time period for calories, exercise, and weight loss.  However, what really made me excited about this tool is that it has an awesome iPhone App that automatically syncs with the online account and maintains all of that information that was posted online!  This helps me because sometimes I am not at the computer, but I ALWAYS have my phone!

So whether you use MyFitnessPal.com or some other food tracking tool, just start tracking.  This, along with proper exercise, is the BEST way to help you achieve your weight loss goals.  In just 2 weeks I have lost 2 pounds, and I am definitely happy for that!

A sample of my food dairy log on Jan 29th (myfitnesspal.com)

PDF Print version of my food diary (myfitnesspal.com)

My 2-week calorie trend chart (myfitnesspal.com)

It’s Time in ’09!

Okay, it truly is time in 2009 to do things differently than you’ve always done. It’s time to stay the course and honor whatever commitments that you have made for 2009 in terms of living a healthier life. It’s time to stop the “lose weight quick diets” only to find that you will gain all of the lost weight back by the next year. Stop the roller coaster weight loss madness and join me and make a commitment to eat healthier and exercise more for 2009. This is truly the best diet that you can ever do in your lifetime! So stop researching the best diet—the water diet or the oatmeal diet or whatever else diet—that can help you lose weight fast, and plan to do something that you and your loved ones can commit to for the long term.

There’s no perfect time to start, you just have to do like Nike says and “Just Do It.” Instead of going to the extreme and eliminating everything, start slow and make small changes to your diet. If you want to join the “It’s Time in ‘09” challenge, please email info@rhondascooking.com to learn more about our programs. For a limited time, we will have several promotional sales.