Using an App to Track Nutrition and Exercise: Pros and Cons

Most people who track their diet and exercise use an app on their mobile device. I decided to track everything manually, beginning with the first day of the pre-surgery fast.

I have a beautiful blank notebook that I had never used. It was a gift, associated with a very special memory. (The book was a gift from my mother, a souvenir of our trip to France together in 2014.) I decided that this huge life decision deserved this special book. 

In the notebook, in addition to diet and exercise, I've included my questions for the dietitian, notes from my dietitian sessions, any pain or discomfort I experience, any milestones, challenges, and so on. It's a record of my bariatric journey. 

I really like having a record of all this on paper, and associating it with a very joyous memory. I'll continue to use the book to record notes from my dietitian sessions, and any other issues (qualitative rather than quantitative evidence, as we say in the information biz).

But now that I'm moving into a permanent bariatric diet, I realized an app would be very helpful. I chose SparkPeople, and I signed up for the "premium" (paid) version right away.

The paid level has many good features, but the reason I'm using it is to eliminate advertising. Something I use every day, both on my computer and my phone, cannot be plastered with ads. I'm fortunate that I can easily spend another $5/month. Not everyone can, and there are free versions of all the weight-loss apps.

There are many advantages to using a mobile app for nutrition and exercise tracking. However, for me, there are also disadvantages. In some ways it makes my life easier... in other ways it makes things more challenging.

Advantages

The advantages to using an app are obvious.

1. When you enter the food you've eaten, it automatically enters the nutritional value -- calories, protein, and anything else you might be monitoring, such as carbs, fat, vitamins, and so on. No need to look up anything.

2. It tracks and calculates your totals daily, weekly, monthly, and all-time. No need to look back through your week or month, no need to add anything. 

3. Once you've eaten a food, and entered it into the app in a way that reflects your habits (brand, portion size, method of cooking), the next time you eat it, you just tap or click on it. Easy.

4. You can group foods and ingredients that you eat together. For example, I grouped "milk, 1%, 16 ounces," "frozen berries, 1 cup," and "protein powder, whey, unsweetened, 1 scoop" into "protein smoothie". I'll do this with everything I cook, too. 

For me, these are the advantages. The app saves me time and repetitive work.

5. If you are not accustomed to tracking your habits, using an app would make it easier, and hopefully increase the likelihood that you'll continue tracking.

6. If you need more support, the popular apps offer articles, blogs, recipes, workouts, and so on, and also have communities that support and encourage each other. Goddess knows there is no shortage of any of these things online! But it does put everything in one place, which might help you focus. 

Disadvantages

The disadvantages to using an app are less obvious, unless you already have a good awareness of eating disorders.

1. Most apps track your exercise against your eating. They encourage the idea of exercise as a way of eliminating calories: "I walked 30 minutes today, now I can eat more!" 

This can be the first step down a very dangerous road. 

- We do not only expend calories when we exercise. We burn calories every moment, with every breath, all day, even when we're asleep. 

- There are so many reasons to get regular physical exercise, for both your physical and mental health. Exercise lowers blood sugar, lowers blood pressure, reduces the risk of heart attack, stroke, and diabetes, combats fatigue, helps regulate mood, boosts metabolism, and more. A life that includes regular physical exercise is a healthier, happier life than one that does not. Weight-loss apps encourage you to think of exercise solely in terms of calories burned.

- Tracking exercise against eating can very quickly lead to feeling that you have to "burn off" everything you eat -- that eating anything without exercising afterwards will lead to weight gain. 

Have you ever excused yourself before eating something by referencing your exercise? As you're about to take your first bite, you say (either out loud or to yourself), "It's OK, I'm going to the gym later today." 

Maybe you say it once as a joke. Or maybe you think it all the time. Maybe you privately believe you don't deserve to eat unless you have exercised. Or that eating food without specifically pairing that food with exercise will cause you to gain weight. This is called exercise bulimia. In this case, the purging associated with bulimia takes the form of exercise.

In the paid level of the app I'm using, you can turn off the "track exercise against eating" function. I've done that... and now the app tells me "Calories Burned: 0".

2. The app tells you "calories left to eat for the day". 

Tracking calories over time is useful and important. I get that. Post weight-loss surgery, it would be very easy to eat a tiny bit more every day or every week, gradually increasing your capacity -- and ultimately preventing or even reversing your weight loss. 

However, basing your food choices on "calories left to eat for the day" could also create a dependence on the calorie counter, rather than learning how to assess your own hunger. Last night I noticed the app told me I had 250 calories left to eat for the day. But I was done eating. I had no interest or desire to eat anything else. 

The previous night, I had minus 300 calories left -- that is, I ate 300 calories too many. I had been genuinely hungry, and ate too fast (my ongoing challenge), not giving my brain enough time to register the food intake. 

In the second example, calorie tracking was very helpful. I can look at the daily total and remind myself to continue trying to eat more slowly. In the first example, tracking would encourage me to eat when I wasn't hungry.

* * * * *

I plan to continue to use SparkPeople, both on my computer and on my phone. But I want to stay aware of these pitfalls. I'm hoping awareness, plus my own discipline, is enough to keep me from falling into them. 

But honestly, I'm a bit nervous about it. My January 1 weigh-in is coming, and thinking about stepping on the scale, I'm already getting anxious. I'm not freaking out or anything close, but this is nagging in the back of my mind. 

Week 9: Arriving at a New Almost-Normal

I seem to be naturally segueing into a bariatric diet, meaning a new way of eating that I'll continue for the rest of my life. The frequency of stomach discomfort is way down, at most once or twice per week. I'm finding more things that I can eat. And I'm gradually figuring out how to prepare food for our home -- some for me alone, some for my partner alone, and some for both of us. 

New stuff I'm eating (or not eating)

- I had sushi and sashimi this week. Sushi is one of my favourite foods -- actually it might be my very favourite food at this point -- and it was wonderful to eat it again. Portion size will be a challenge, but on the other hand, I can eat it regularly.

- I also had soup from our local Chinese restaurant, a "house special" wonton soup that they make with bits of roast pork, shrimp, chicken and vegetables. I separate the broth, which keeps the vegetables crunchy and hugely reduces the salt content, as I eat a very minimal amount of broth. 

- After the liquid and pureed phases, I was really missing eating something with crunch. In the past I would get that from raw vegetables -- and yes, the occasional chips -- but both those categories are off-limits right now. This week I started eating the whole-grain (brown) rice cakes that we always have on hand, with a small amount of peanut butter spread on. Healthy crunch!

- I've given up my decades-long habit of having strong black tea in the afternoon. I'm trying to limit my caffeine intake, so I've switched to herbal tea. Previously I've only occasionally gone for herbal tea, but now it's daily. I'm not sure if I can keep this up long-term. I've never liked decaf black tea, but if I could find a good brand, I'd try that. 

- I'm going to try different later-stage foods a little at a time, randomly, as I feel like it. I think as long as I eat slowly, it will be OK.

Things I've learned

Calculating the grams of protein I eat every day has led to some interesting insights. I've always paid attention to nutrition, but as most dieters know, it's also easy to fool yourself.

- We've always eaten a lot of seafood, and I've known that it is very high in protein and sometimes rich in healthy and important fats. Looking at the actual numbers has really reinforced this. Seafood is pure protein, a big bang for your protein buck. We eat tuna and salmon, both fresh and canned, trout, halibut, Pacific cod, scallops, shrimp, and probably a few others. 

 (I often joke that my tuna consumption is turning me into a thermometer. That's the big but of seafood... and why I switched to Skipjack (or "light") tuna, from Albacore (or "white") tuna. Skipjack is also less dangerous to marine mammals that die in driftnets.)

-  I've always thought that hummus is a healthy food and imagined it was rich in protein. Nope! As a spread or dip, it is certainly healthier than mayonnaise or sour cream, but it's not high in protein. Hummus, at least the commercial variety, really doesn't qualify as a protein source at all. 

- Much to my surprise, tofu is not very high in protein either -- nothing like chicken, fish, or meat. You would have to eat a lot of tofu to meet daily protein requirements. I realize that different people have different protein needs, but this partly explains why, when I was a vegetarian, I was so unhealthy.

Cooking for two, or 1.5

My partner and I have never eaten the exact same food, but normally any dinner I would cook would be for both of us. Now this has become a challenge. 

So far, as you may have read, I've been doing advance cooking for him, which we save for the nights he is working. At first these meals were 100% for him. Now I'm including some meals that I can also eat, or eat in a modified way, such as giving myself more meat and less rice. 

I'm also still cooking ahead for myself, and putting portions in muffin tins. This has turned out to be so useful for me, both for portion size and variety, that I want to continue it. 

One positive piece of this is that I'm eating food that my partner doesn't like, foods I had stopped eating at home, because I didn't want to bother making them just for myself. A large sweet potato -- baked until it's completely soft, almost syrupy -- lasts me almost a week. That's just one example of several.

All this has led to a great deal of food prep, and it sometimes feels burdensome, especially when I'm working long hours. This week my partner did a lot of prep for me -- cleaning, chopping, mincing, and leaving everything in tiny pyrex bowls in the fridge. That made a huge difference, but I don't want to make a habit of it. (Well, I'd love to make a habit of it, but I won't.)

This is something I'm going to have to feel my way through and make changes as I go along. In the past, anything I couldn't completely plan out in advance was very challenging for me. I'd feel anxious about having too many unknowns. But these days I'm much better about living with unknowns, and adjusting as needed.

Every day I see evidence of how weight-loss surgery is really a tool for people who already understand nutrition, who have had experience dieting and monitoring their food intake, who are mentally stable enough to deal with a lot of change, and who have support. Without those factors, it would be much more difficult to succeed.

Week 7: Protein Requirements, the Tiny Stomach, Clothing

I've been introducing soft foods into my diet in a totally random and haphazard way. 

I'm still eating the pureed food I prepared. We bought more muffin tins, so I was able to make larger batches, fill the cups with half-cup portions, and freeze several tins. But I'm also eating canned fruit, oatmeal, soup that has not been pureed, well-cooked sweet potato, a scrambled egg, peanut butter, and so on. 

I'm gradually weaning myself off the pureed foods, but I will probably keep some of that in my diet for a long time.

Getting enough protein

I'm completely sick of smoothies, but without them, it's very difficult to meet the protein requirements while not overeating -- even while adding protein powder to foods like soup or oatmeal. Some days I give myself a break from the smoothies, but when I calculate the grams of protein on those days, it's always borderline. 

Experimenting with different flavours in the smoothies hasn't helped. I'm sick of drinking so much frothy liquid. But I must do it. 

Once I'm done with all the transition phases, and I'm on a regular post-bariatric eating plan, the protein requirements will be reduced. Still a lot, and still very important, but the difference between 70-120 grams/day (post-surgery) and 60-70 grams/day (regular bariatric diet) is significant. 

So, for now, smoothies it is.

The tiny stomach

Learning to eat more slowly continues to be a painful challenge. 

Last night, for example, I wanted the 16 ounces of milk that I normally use for a smoothie, mixed with this turmeric "golden mylk" blend. It was late and I wanted to finish it up and go to bed. Instead of sipping the milk, I glugged about half of it. 

The results were agonizing -- sharp pain, nausea, bloating -- and lasted more than two hours. 

Looking back through my food diary, I see this is happening less frequently, so I've made some progress. I guess I just have to keep trying.

Clothing

A few readers have asked me about buying new clothes. I'm not rushing to do that any time soon. Like many women, my history with chronic dieting and body image can make buying clothes a stressful and unpleasant experience. 

This has improved a great deal by shopping online, and by my hard work at self-acceptance. But even so, I don't want to buy clothes in a smaller size until I am sure I can maintain that size. Honestly, clothes shopping is not something I even want think about yet.

However... there are some clothes at home that I'm thinking about.

I have a large number of graphic tees -- the kind I wouldn't wear to work, but generally wear all weekend and while working from home -- that I really like, that haven't fit for several years. These are shirts with logos of a certain sports team, from social-justice activism, and so on. I never got rid of these. They were already larger than I liked, and were in good shape... so I just hung on to them, and tried not to think about them.

Now I am gradually starting to wear them again. That's pretty cool. 

The other exception is a collection of professional wear, especially beautiful jackets (the kind some people call blazers or suit jackets). 

Beginning a new career in 2013, I needed new clothes, first for interviewing, then for working. Making peace with my body -- at that time largest I had ever been -- I found a great store that sold plus-size petites. I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but when you are short and heavy, this is an incredible lifesaver. They also made shopping easier, with salespeople you can book in advance, so you can shop by yourself, but still have someone going back and forth to get different sizes and ideas for outfits.

This store's clothes were exactly the right mix of dressy and casual, and I started building a new professional wardrobe. The jackets were especially brilliant -- really stylish, but still classic, and they fit beautifully. 

I wore these jackets for several years. I must admit, dressing well and having clothes that fit nicely increased my confidence. 

Then one day I noticed with horror that the jackets no longer fit as well as they should; they were too snug. Then no longer fit, full stop. I kept them, but stopped wearing them.

A couple of years ago, my partner and I relocated, and these jackets are now too dressy for my present situation. I bought some sweaters -- long, open-front cardigans -- to wear over dressy t-shirts. This let me change my look and buy larger-size clothing without feeling awful about no longer fitting into those jackets.

Now I am looking forward to putting on these jackets, and buttoning them, and feeling that I have reached a goal -- not the final destination, but a landmark along the way. However, I don't want to go near the jackets until I am certain that they will fit. So I'm waiting.

December 1 Weigh-In

I lost 28 pounds.

Wow. 

The hair stylist I mentioned in this post -- who used to be very heavy -- estimated I lost 30 pounds, but I couldn't believe that would be true. She was right!

Wow.