Kirk Petersen

My new favorite iPhone app is Lose It. You start by putting in your current weight and your target weight and how many pounds per week you’d like to lose. Then it shows you how many calories you can eat per day and has a nice interface for adding your calorie intake (food) and any calories you burn over the baseline (exercise). There is a weekly view that makes it easy to go over a bit on Saturday due to a dinner party but then make up for it with a Sunday run.

If I remember correctly, the app is even free.

My only complaint is with its food database. Every time I search for something I end up getting lots of fast/processed/packaged/frozen options. And the entries often seem to be too low. But it is fairly easy to simply increase the portions to account for that.

Shanti and I are dieting. Things are going well so far.

This is one of those things where the issue is obvious – eat less and/or exercise more and you’ll lose weight. But it helps to have some approximate numbers.

One of the most interesting bits of information I’ve ever read about dieting:

For each pound of weight that your body carries, it takes about 12 calories per pound per day to keep it alive. If you weigh 150 pounds, you therefore need about (150 * 12) 1,800 calories per day to keep yourself alive and maintain that same weight.

If you were to eat more than 1,800 calories per day, the surplus turns into fat. It takes about 3,600 excess calories to make a pound of fat.

(from http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/question693.htm)

I’m currently about 235 pounds and that is pretty stable when I eat whenever and whatever I want. That equals 2800 calories per day, which seems like a huge amount. One of the other interesting bits of info I recently learned is that large milkshakes are 1000+ calories. A big bowl of ice cream is probably in the same ballpark.

I probably eat 2400 calories per day normally (still seems like a lot), which would put me at a very nice weight of 200 pounds, but I ruin it by pigging out on a milkshake or three at least once a week.

We’ve been using a Google Docs Spreadsheet to track all of the details. I love its collaboration features, including the new “form” feature. I might use that for some data gathering projects in the future.

I’m currently shooting for 2000 calories a day, which will put me at 200 pounds in about 2 months, assuming little to no exercise.

To recap: 3 milkshakes equals 3500 calories equals 1 pound equals 3 hours of running. Sometimes you just need to make it clear and remind yourself.

I’ve lost over 15 pounds in the past 3 months. I feel really good. Not just because of the accomplishment, or the fact that some old clothes are starting to fit again, but simply because I’m eating less and that’s just the way my body likes it.

People always say that you should eat a bunch of smaller meals throughout the day, and I guess that’s what I’m doing, but whenever they say that I imagine eating like 8 little snacks and that doesn’t work for me. What does work is having something small (yogurt is my favorite) in the morning and late in the evening, in addition to a normal lunch and a small dinner. What kills me is a snack in the afternoon (it just makes the post-lunch coma worse) and big dinners.

A nice side effect of the small dinner is that I don’t get the same 11pm rush of energy that I get after digesting a large dinner. Instead, I still feel a bit hungry and tired and just go to sleep.

I had a lot of luck with this diet in 4 years ago and it took quite a while to gain the weight back. Probably 3 years. Hopefully I can do at least as well this time.