Caloric Confusion

If you are like me and have no Idea how many calories are in the things you eat, and have no desire to carry around a little book or pieces of paper that tell you how many calories the foods have, then I have a treat for you. It is called MyPlate and it is found on livestrong.com. Last Monday I was completely confused about Calories and how many I needed to eat in order to avoid starving my body and still be able to lose weight, and then I remembered Livestrong.com. My sister told me about it a few months ago and I thought is was cool, but now I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE it! You can search for what you eat, tell it how much of it you ate, and it will tell you what your daily caloric intake was, as well as the percentages of Carbs, Fats and Proteins you have eaten that day. So far, 99% of the time, I have been able to find things I eat, and not just the ingredients but the finished products, like Recipezaar's Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies and Tatertot Casserole! This has made it so easy to track my food, it has become my computerized food diary- and if I need to show my doctor, I can just print it off and take it in to her office.

There is one part of the MyPlate that has confused me this week. You can tell the program how much weight you want to lose each week, it takes into account your height and current weight, and then sets a caloric goal for you. When you enter foods it subtracts them from your goal and tells you how much more you can eat that day. It also has a section where you can enter your exercises for the day.....my confusion comes from the fact that it adds however many calories you burned back into your Goal for the day. For example, if I had 600 calories left for the day and I entered that I had burned 500 calories on the treadmill, my caloric goal would go up to 11oo. And that got me wondering, do I need to take in more calories when I burn a lot of calories, to avoid my body feeling like I am starving it, when you are loosing weight the last thing you want is for your body to think that it needs to save ever calorie you eat, that just sucks.

So over the next few weeks I am going to do an experiment. I will try it both ways. I will eat only the original caloric goal for a week or two, and then I will eat the original goal, plus the extra calories that I burned during my work out. I think that I will lose weight either way, but I am interested in losing weight in a way that my body is happy and comfortable with, so that I won't just gain it back next year.

I think that I will use MyPlate for a long time, especially when I am done losing and trying my best to maintain, because I can set my goal to maintain my weight and it will continue to do the same things, tell me how much I can eat and track how well I do each day.