Has anyone tried Myfitnesspal.com? A friend told me about it yesterday and I started using their food tracker. I also ran a recipe through it, so I could figure out how many calories to put in for my lasagna. Nice site.
My husband and I are people who genuinely LOVE food of all kinds. We're adventurous eaters. We love trying new ethnic foods; Thai, Indian, various middle-eastern and Mediterranean...we love it all. I also really like cooking...especially comforting foods; stews, casseroles, pastas...and baking! I love to bake. Breads, scones, muffins, pies - I love my carbs! Cooking is an art. Baking is a science. I flatter myself that I'm pretty good at both and the payoff is you get to eat the end result!
The best thing we got out of Weight Watchers was portion control...which is a challenge for us. When we're being serious, we get the scale and measuring cups out and weigh and measure everything. Weight Watchers had nothing off limits...but that piece of cake you saved 6 pts for? It's not 6 if you eat a serving 3X bigger than they say to. I'll never forget the first time that I measured out a cup of spaghetti and half cup of sauce and we were shocked at the size. It was both more than we expected and way less than we had been eating. Turned out it was enough to fill us up...we just had to pay attention.
The other thing we really got shocked by was just how bad our diets had been. We ate a lot of fast food. Did you know that for the calories in one Sonic breakfast burrito and medium tater tots, you could eat four and a half Krispy Kreme donuts? It never even occurred to me that there was 500 calories and 29 grams of fat in a single breakfast burrito! Your basic taco salad from Taco Bell has 780 calories. A Dairy Queen four-piece chicken strip basket has 1,020 calories!
Keeping track and paying attention to the point of obsessing was the only way I was ever successful at losing weight. I guess I'm going to have to go back to obsessing over that, instead of over my kid.