Tools for Health

nutritiondata and sparkpeople are great but I'm like michelle, I find it too much work to keep up on those sites.

Much simpler, if I'm finding myself in a phase of eating really badly, my friend and I have a system. We email each other everyday a completely honest list of everything we've eaten that day. The pressure of knowing I'm going to have to tell someone all the crap I've eaten is usually enough to keep me eating properly.

I used SparkPeople for a several weeks and yes I too was amazed at what I was eating. Actually it wasn't as big a surprise as it could have been. I knew I was taking in a couple thousand calories a meal and few each snack, but it wasn't until I totalled it up that I got the big piture.

I was having some health issues and started the tracking and my intake went from 3800+ callories a day to 1200-1500 calories a day or less. Now some of that was from watching what I ate and sticking to a strict set of foods to eat. But some of it was just not wanting to eat for much of that time. In the end I lost 30 pounds from my highest weight (doctor recorded anyway )

Now unfortunately, I went in to see a dietitician to see what I could improve and to learn some basics of levels of certain nutrients I should be getting. I was told that one that she didn't like telling people what levels a person should be getting and two I was doing everything all wrong. Then we did the whole wheigh in and body composition and found that nearly all my numbers were where they should be except my muscle mass was off by a couple of pounds.

I left that appointment more confused and discouraged than when I went in and I basically stopped my weight control plan at that point. Since then I have put back on nearly 20 pounds.

Well enough about my story. I find SparkPeople a pain to enter in what I ate for the day. Page refresh was very slow and if you entered something for the wrong meal all you could do was add it for the correct meal and then go back in and delete it for the wrong meal. And with pages that took a long time to refresh this took a long time to correct. I did like the fact that you can track various different nutrient values but didn't like the fact that if you wanted to tracka new one, it wouldn't go back and show you past history for it. Also their graphing ability was limited to how they wanted to show the data.

Thanks for your impressions of Sparkpeople, 'the_hubby', and I'm sorry for the discouragement and confusion brought on by the so-called dietitian. They may have known their field of food and nutrition but it sounds as if they were morons when it came to relating and working with a client. There is something known as 'dead right' and it's when you have all the knowledge and facts on your side but you loose the situation and it seems as if this 'expert' didn't help you in the long run. I'm sorry for that. I would suggest you write that one off, start over - learning at your own pace and do what you know how to do. It sounds like you did it well.

I have not gotten into entering foods and exercise into Sparkpeople. I'm already doing that on My Fitness Pal web site and haven't musttered the time and energy to make the double entries yet. I have found My Fitness Pal to be a pain but fairly simple and straight forward.

By all my tracking and checking, I think I'm making progress. I'm into day 9 of this program and I haven't suffered too much in the way of sore muscles. I've been doing a 45-55 minute moderate work-out a day with a heart rate up around 140 - 150 for a sustained 20 minute or more segment of time. My sleep pattern has changed drastically to where I'm now sleeping within an hour of getting off work and I'm sleeping longer. My blood sugars have nose-dived and I'm now running in the 90's to 115 which is often.

One peculiar thing I've observed is this, and I need to ask my doctor about it when I see her in March; when I woke up this morning my glucose reading was 116 but after a 50 minute moderate work-out it was 142! I don't know if that's something I need to be concerned about or not. The elevated reading is because my body is screaming for more fuel and the sugar is being released from somewhere and with diabetes, my pancreas isn't quite on top of the situation of regulating the whole mess, I guess? It just surprised me when I first noticed this phenomena, I had supposed that exercise would have lowered my glucose levels but it raises them, at least temporarily. I'll take another reading an hour after exercise and see what happens.

That's one of the benefits of monitoring and tracking what I am doing, it reveals the truth of what's occurring not just what I imagine is happening. I think in coming days, other measurements and records will reveal additional surprises and insights to help me achieve my goals. At least I hope that's what will happen.