Accountability

The scale said 136 again this morning... I checked. Twice. Okay, three times, but I swear I'm usually not so nutty about the number. It just that I have this really neat digital scale that measures body fat, and it did that little hiccup the first time. A quick glimpse at 135.5 before settling frustratingly back in to 136. I've had it for probably seven years now, through ups and downs and a baby, and it's still teasing me.

See, if I had started this blog six months ago, it would have been called The Last Ten instead, when I was hovering around 130. Which is really pretty boring, since the whole world seems to be trying to lose the last ten. I think for the sake of my ass that I'd rather be back there though.

This is where that whole balance thing that I mentioned yesterday comes in. For about eight months, I tracked my calories and exercise very closely. Which worked... really well. I found that having to put into the program every last calorie, from a grape to a chocolate chip, made me more accountable to myself. I wasn't about to eat something that I knew would skew my numbers in the wrong direction. I wasn't going to admit to a computer program that I'd just scarfed 4 mini packets of Nerds because they still remind me of 1st grade. So I just didn't eat the junk. And I lost the weight.

While I love the program, here are the problems that I found: 1) It forces you to really know exactly what and how many nutrients are in every item you consume. The easiest solution I had for this was eating way too many packaged foods. Arguably healthy packaged foods... yogurt and a Clif bar for breakfast, Lean Cuisine for lunch, but processed and packaged nonetheless. 2) The time it takes to log every. single. morsel. of food you've eaten in a day can get extensive. I tried to combat this by eating a lot of the same things, especially for breakfast and lunch, then just rotating through a few well known healthy dinners. It was still a lot of time.

That's not to say that I wouldn't, or won't go back to it. If this little experiment doesn't work out, and I can't keep close enough track in my head, then I'm right back on that calorie counting train. I figure I'm *this* close... I've already gained back six. It's just that I really can't fathom tracking each spinach leaf for the next 40 or 50 years.

That's where the title of this post comes in. What I really did like about the program was the accountability factor. Knowing that I was going to have to put down in words and numbers how much I'd eaten and how hard I worked out kept me more motivated. I challenge anyone to try it. Keep track of every calorie you eat for a week. Not in that half-assed, rationalizing 'eh, that giant bowl of ice cream probably had 100 calories' kind of way. Write it all down, every bite... in a notebook, on the computer, wherever. I bet you'll think twice about a second biscuit with dinner when you know you'll have to see it in writing later. You'll hear about tracking your calories time and again if you spend any time at all in the "world of weight-loss." And it's because there really is truth there.

I'm hoping that writing here can bring me both the balance and the accountability that I need. For instance... I ate a big handful of peanut butter filled pretzels tonight while I was making dinner. Stupid, right? Here I am cooking a really healthy dinner of steamed jasmine brown rice, healthy-ish orange chicken from Trader Joe's, and steamed broccoli sprinkled with cardamom. It was practically done. Then I ate close to 300 calories of pretzels.

I bet the scale won't even bother teasing tomorrow.