At first, I laughed it off. My sister dubbed me Uncle Chubbs and my newborn nephew quickly came to know me by the name. Yeah, I had put on 15 pounds, but hey, I had been a bag of bones since I was a kid. I could use some filling out. Not a problem.
Plus, I knew why I was gaining weight. Stress. It started when I lived in a bad housing situation with neighbors from hell. It got worse as I served on my building's co-op board and the insanity that brought. Throw on a couple lawsuits and yeah, stress mounts and good habits go out the door.
Not that I had good eating habits before, but I didn't eat the same bad foods everyday. This became pizza or fried chicken, ice cream, and beer daily.
After a year and a half I started to address the stress. First, I physically removed myself from it. I put distance between it and me. Second, I did not run for re-election on the board. Third, the legal BS ended. That only took another year and a half during which time the 15 additional pounds became 26.
That's when I saw a picture of myself from this past summer. I didn't recognize myself. I was shocked at how big I had become.
I had read in
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg how some people had quit smoking by keeping a daily tally of how many cigarettes they smoked. The simple act of taking note, of seeing the numbers for themselves, and the shame of marking another one off over time helped people quit. I set out to find a smartphone app that would help me do the same thing with food.
I found MyFitnessPal. I cannot recommend this free app enough. It helped me not only keep track of my daily food intake by setting a specific calorie goal per day, but to learn the caloric values of the foods I ate. I quickly saw that the fish and chips I ate every Tuesday night out at trivia alone put me over my daily limit. Out went the chain restaurant fish and chips.
It also forced me to starting looking at nutritional fact labels. That cup of whole milk I drink at breakfast? That's 150 calories. A cup of almond milk? Half that. A tablespoon of Nutella on my bread? That's 200 calories. A tablespoon of Loacker, a dead-on Nutella substitute? 160. That's a 20% difference. These things add up.
I also started drinking out of a Ball's Mason jar. Why? Because they delineate portions by cup. Now I know exactly how much I'm consuming. I used to think a tall glass of milk was one serving. Wrong. It was more like three.
But life on 1,620 calories a day isn't great. So I woke up an hour earlier and hit the treadmill. 30 minutes a day five days a week. At first I took it easy burning 110 calories or so. Eventually I got up to 339 in the same 30 minutes. That turned my daily calorie allowance from 1,620 to a more manageable 1,959. I didn't have to starve myself to lose weight.
I also had a good conversation with a health consultant at the local YMCA. He gave me a reasonable idea of what to expect and what to hope for. Shoot for losing a pound a week, he told me. More than that and you shock your system to the point where it thinks you're in survival mode and it will make it harder for you to lose the weight.
So I didn't lose 16 pounds in a night, a week, or a month. No, it took 3 months, but once I knew how long it would take I could relax and not stress unrealistic expectations.
The only downside was that I couldn't use any of my cookbooks or recipes I had picked up from family or some of the best cooks in NYC that I had worked with. Michael White's
Classico e Moderno and David Chang's
Momofuku cookbooks, which I had just gotten over the holidays, did me no good as they didn't have nutritional facts that I could plug into MyFitnessPal. Sure, I could fudge it, guesstimate, but I could be off by 10 calories or a few hundred. I'd only know when the weight didn't come off.
Rather, I had to find new recipes that did. Fortunately, sites like Yummly.com have some such recipes, but I there are so many other recipes that don't and I don't want to give them up, especially if they are, in fact, good for me.
And so I am slowly setting out to create Cookbook Calculator, a smartphone app that will allow people to calculate the nutritional facts of their recipes, save them, and export them to apps like MyFitnessPal.
This blog will follow Cookbook Calculator's progress from idea to app.
