count my calories every day for a month

lose 10 pounds

I am getting married, and part of the hope is to be able to present my best self to the altar of forevercore and make the best promises with the best intentions in the best state of mind. So, Kellianne and I decided to take our little adventure one step further and become all crazy about calorie counting for a while. Why not?

Also, I’m working on an iPhone app that’s all about recording daily morale, health, sleep, etc, and it’s sort of in the same ballpark.

After looking at Absolute Fitness in the iPhone store for a second time, and every other calorie counting app there so far, I’ve determined that the current state of iPhone app calorie counting leaves MUCH to be desired, unless you eat at fast food restaurants all the time.

Turning to the web, I found a bunch of equally lame sites dedicated to giving you free calorie counting software in exchange for signing up for their 36 mailing lists and navigating their insanely confusing food database. I had almost given in to using the company Lance Armstrong bought and rebranded, The Daily Plate. Luckily, Lia Steakley had already done all of this and found that myfooddiary.com is the best, for a $9/month fee of course. No problem. This is wedding-related, work-related, and fun-related, the expense is excusable 15 different ways.

So far, it’s still a bit of a pain to manually enter each thing you’ve eaten, but it’s not nearly as bad as any of the other options I saw. They have actual foods rather than just crazy lists of ingredients. Also, it’s well-designed and packed with reports, stats, and charts. Sort of perfect for me. Not only does it count calories, but it tells you which parts of your diet are healthy, which are unhealthy, and even tells you when you’re not eating enough (like both of us yesterday). I actually don’t need to lose any weight, I mostly just want to be mindful of health for these next two months.

A funny realization I had is that this is pretty close to being the ungameable game that I’ve been thinking about for many years now. In the exercise section, it gives you “points” for doing all kinds of household chores, for shopping, gardening, various kinds of working, etc.

In order to be truly complete, would it have to also take into account spending? And earning? It’s a daydream of mine to turn the boring tasks of calorie-counting, budgeting, and socializing into a game that is easy to play.

For now I’m just gonna return to being OCD and enter that I’ve had another delicious iced coffee from Vita, and that it’s 70 calories on account of the cream.