As some of you may know, I’ve been working on losing weight. Last summer I finally noticed that I was officially in the “overweight” category according to the height/weight charts. This surprised me since I didn’t feel overweight. However, while I know that numbers lie, if the height and weight charts claimed I was overweight I figured it was probably right. I probably should also have noticed that my clothing was starting to be a little snug

I love food so I initially started trying to lose weight by just exercising and keeping my eating habits the same. Unfortunately, this didn’t really help much. Eventually, I decided that I really needed to start paying attention to how many calories I was eating each day. It was really shocking. I eat fairly balanced meals (though I do make a fair amount of dessert from scratch). Using various diet websites I learned that it wasn’t what I was eating that was the problem. It was how much I was eating. What I considered a “serving size” was actually closer to two or three serving sizes.

It was hard making my body relearn how much food was reasonable to eat. Fortunately, I was able to extend my obsession with spreadsheets to an obsession with recording everything I ate. This helped me stay on track. My main calorie counter website for the first couple of months was SparkPeople. It’s a really nice website. However, it isn’t designed for people that cook a lot. You can create “recipes” but once created you couldn’t change them. If you decided to modify a recipe, you had to reenter the entire recipe with the added modifications (they’ve recently changed this so it works much better now).

Eventually, I decided that to get all the features I wanted in a nutrition program, I would probably need to use a desktop application. I don’t like desktop applications since they tie me to using one computer. However, none of the free nutrition websites had the features I needed. I downloaded trial versions of several different nutrition programs. My favorite, and the one I decided to buy, is called Nutribase Personal Plus.

Nutribase is really an amazing program. It has all the normal features that most nutrition software has and also some added features. For instance, it lets me add a recipe to a recipe. I have a basic Cuban Black Bean recipe that sometimes I use as a burrito filling and sometimes I serve over rice. This program allows me to create the basic Black Bean recipe and then add that recipe to my “Burrito” or “Rice” recipe. It’s really wonderful. Nutribase also comes with meal plans for Vegetarians and Vegans for a variety of calorie needs (1000 to 2800). I think the meal plan feature is a nice idea but I’m too independent to want to use premade meal ideas The program also allows me to create my own monthly meal plans so someday I’ll probably get ambitious and try that feature out.

Since around September I’ve lost about 15 lbs. I’m now within an acceptable weight range for my height. I’m planning to lose 5 more lbs. Why? Jaeger and I plan to have children within the next 3-4 years. I want to get on the lower side of my healthy weight range before becoming pregnant because I suspect I’m the ballooning type It’s not that I’m afraid of gaining weight when I’m pregnant, that’s obviously a natural process. However, I am concerned that I’ll have trouble losing it once the baby comes. I’m hoping that by starting with a healthy weight and good eating habits my pregnancy and weight loss afterwards will not be as challenging.

My family has a history of obesity. As a result, I suspect that I’ll need to continue counting calories in some form my whole life. Once I meet my last 5 lb goal, I’m going to start ratcheting up the number of calories I eat each day until I appear to have hit my calorie equilibrium. This is the part I’m least certain about. Of course, I don’t need to worry about this for at least a couple more months