The Dish on MyPlate

Almost a month ago I (Dawn) wrote that I had taken my father-in-law’s advice (from his guest blog on Tribe Tracks) and tried out the Livestrong.com’s “MyPlate” feature.  As of today, I have used MyPlate for just a hair over 6 weeks and I wanted to share what I have discovered for myself. Please note that my observations and non-professional recommendations (have I mentioned that I am neither a doctor nor a nutritionist?) are based on using this tool to help me lose weight. MyPlate can also be used to gain or maintain weight as well.

The first thing that got my attention was the price. It’s free. Dollar-wise you just can’t get any better than this. So now that you know that the price is right, let’s talk about the various tools at your disposal.

Setting up. Your first stop is the “Calorie Goals” tab where you will input your age, height, weight, weight goals (be they losing, gaining or maintaining your current weight) and your activity level. You click the magic calculate button and it tells you what your daily calorie goal is. WARNING! You can get in trouble with choosing the wrong activity level. I did this and I was stalled for a while, I went back and recalculated with an activity level one step lower and that is when I started seeing progress. If you are in doubt about your activity level choose the lower (less active) option. Yes, it’s going to give you fewer calories to work with but that is what you need if you wish to lose weight.

Using MyPlate Daily. You know that losing weight is about dedication. I am giving you permission to develop a new addiction: tracking your food intake. I want you to get shaky if you are more than two meals behind in tracking. I want you to convulse, sweat and curl up in a ball if you miss a whole day. The only way you can get the hit that you need is to go back and fill it all in and stay current. Does this sound like a pain in the ass? At first it may seem so, but after the first week or so you will become very adept at tracking and it will take so little time it is almost anticlimactic.

Harping on Honesty. I will restate the GroveTribe patriarch’s (aka Steve's) advice that you be honest. Time and time again over the last 6 weeks I have had his words of advice ring through my skull (thank goodness *something* is in there now!). I bought extra measuring cups and spoons and I use them faithfully.  We have a nifty and inexpensive food scale. (I used to laugh at my husband for weighing his food. Of course, his body is formed like that of a Greek god so maybe I should have associated that a lot earlier, but remember, before my father-in-law put his advice into my skull it was empty… empty… empty……  [echoing effect here]) Yet even when I had all the right tools I could still stray towards the dark side; I was tempted over and over to fudge the numbers, sneak just a tiny bit more or “forget” to log something but I resisted Darth Indulgence and instead was brutally honest with myself. Now that I see the results of such honesty, I am glad that I did.

I can hear those doubters saying to themselves that same things I used to. “What a pain.” “Life is hard enough; I have to find pleasure where I can.” “I don’t want to have to deny myself.”  My response is this; If you have to get your joy, your comfort, your consolation, your reward or even psychotherapy from food (as I once did) then you need to take a hard look at where you WANT to get your joy from. I would prefer to get my joy riding our bikes on the trail, playing with my kids and growing to a ripe old age walking hand-in-hand with my husband on the beach near where we got married. These things are worth having a little less food and making better choices. It sucks, it’s hard but as these habits evolve from “diet” to a “lifestyle” it will become second nature and if I can do it, you sure as hell can!

“But I’m so hungry!” It happens to me still and I have learned that there is a fine line that I have to walk to get enough nutrition for the calories I take in. There are at least three ways to help with this.

First, choose carefully the foods that give you your calories. Make sure that they are nutritious. I look to make sure that I am getting a reasonable amount of protein, fiber and carbs as well as vitamins and minerals. Look, no one here is stupid, you know what whole, nourishing food is. If you have 400 calories left for the day how will you use it to best serve your fine machine of a body? 

Second, give your stomach a little time and it will get used to smaller meals. Try hard to avoid a large “reward” or “catch-up” meal that will stretch your stomach out again making it that huge pit that wants to be filled with food. After a few weeks of my new discipline my stomach no longer wants a larger meal. For example I have a favorite burger and fries combo at In-N-Out (gasp! Yes, I still go to fast food joints!). I used to be able to eat the burger and a whole basket of fries without blinking. When I discovered that the burger I liked combined with half a basket of fries was only 550 calories and could fit in well with my calorie goals I started eating that amount. After a while, I found that if I tried to eat a whole basket of fries with the meal my stomach would protest. Even if I needed the calories, I would let that fullness be my guide and wait a couple of hours to catch up on calories rather than forcing them into my full stomach and stretching it out.  Yes, this old… dog…. has learned some new tricks.

Be conscious of what you eat. Put down the magazine. Turn off the TV. Put the damn car in park and sit and LOOK at your food. Make conscious note of every bite you put in your mouth and chew the stuff before you swallow it. In our fast-paced society it is too easy to inhale food and have it gone before you even know what happened. “Hey! Who ate the last cookie?” You probably did, without even realizing it. Okay, back to MyPlate…

Fitness Tracker. Here is where I run in to my unique challenges. I have to be very careful because of my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. My good old days of hitting the work-outs fast and furious are over. Although it has been extremely frustrating I have learned that if I am gentle with myself -and increase physical activity with tortuous slowness!- I end up much stronger and healthier.  For the last several weeks my work-outs thus far have been limited by the CFS and this cold winter to mostly yoga, tai chi and some gym ball.  With the days warming up now, I expect to hit the trails and ramp up the level of my work-outs. Now here is the rub, a nifty but treacherous feature of the fitness tracker is that it will automatically adjust your “calories remaining” to eat and give you more. If you are only doing mild to moderate exercise RESIST THE URGE to go by this adjustment. Try your best to stick to your calorie allotment for the day.

***BEGIN DISCLAIMER*** Have I done my, “seek the advice of a medical professional before beginning any diet or exercise routine” wheeze yet? Oh, well, be sure that you do. I did and my doctor  is very excited by my progress and what I have learned with MyPlate.  We did have to talk about my specific considerations with CFS but so far all lights are green. ***DISCLAIMER SECTIONS ENDS***

Tracking Food. My favorite feature is the food input field. You start typing something that you ate and this smart little white space on the screen opens up with lots of choices that are related to what you are typing. You can then select your option from the pull down menu (be sure to read the option that you select carefully to be sure its serving size is accurate to what you understand your serving size is) adjust the serving size and select when you ate it. Be patient as the searching feature can be a bit slow but this is a chance to take a deep breath into your belly. (Old Vedic wisdom says to fill your belly with one third food, one third water and one third air.) You will be amazed at how much is pre-programmed! As far as food tracking goes, I have yet to have to enter anything manually!

My Meals. I always have the same one of two breakfasts in the morning and when I learned that I could “pre-program” my meals once and it would plug the whole thing in I was in heaven! You can select your meal and then click on it to adjust an amount if needed. (Yes, one morning I HAD to have an extra half cup of milk.)

Feedback. The most fun of all of this is watching all the graphs, pie charts and logs evolve as you go. You can start to see the trends, track your water, track your fiber, protein, salt, carb and sugar intake. You start to learn your eating habits and it makes it so much easier to adjust them. I have been able to see where I get my calories and where to shave them off. So much of this is about educating yourself not just about eating habits but learning about YOUR eating habits.

WARNING!!!! One of the frustrating features is that nifty bar chart that shows how many calories you consumed over the past few days and today. I get a perverse sense of accomplishment when I see all those bars under the red line (that indicates your maximum calorie allowance for the day) But when you are a good little boy or girl and update that weight loss you were so happy about MyPlates recalculates your new calorie intake and THE RED BAR LOWERS RETROACTIVELY! Yep, I always turn into a preschooler and pout when that red line lowers and it looks as if I had been bad all that past week. It hurts but just ignore it, we both know we are doing great. (Stoopid red bar….)

So even though there are a few things that I could wish worked better this program is well worth the money… er… time investment. 6 weeks later I have lost 10 pounds. (Keep in mind that this is with my stringent restrictions on exercise because of CFS!) MyPlate can be a great tool to help you lose, maintain or gain weight. What it can’t do is make the right food choices for you and it can’t know if you are being honest with yourself.

With that said, watch out Lance! Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers are going to put a price on your head for muscling in on their territory with livestrong.com and MyPlate. However, I think you took it one step further because instead of telling me what to eat, you have helped me learn HOW to eat.

Next Up… I just became a “Gold Member” of livestrong.com’s MyPlate feature for $45 for a year. They promise that I will lose 25% more weight. I will try this for a while and let you folks know if the claims are true (for me at least).

Until next time, stop talking about it and just do it!

Living Strong with CFS

Dawn with "Effie" on winter ride.

For twenty years, I rode a blind roller coaster, not knowing where I was headed and what shape I would be in when I got there. From the time I was a teenager I was struck with disabling periods of illness that left me dizzy, weak, with migraines, painful glands, massive hair loss and literally hundreds of other symptoms.  The illness had been a mystery for so long that my family and I had begun jokingly calling it “Steve” in our “Over the Hedge” reference to anything that was unknown.  It was only last year that I was finally diagnosed and – although I still ride that roller coaster- the blind-fold has been removed.  After finding an amazing doctor that actually listened to me, after almost a year of every test you can imagine (treadmills, MRI’s, CT’s, more blood taken than a Blade movie…) I was finally diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

There is not nearly enough room in this blog to explain just what this illness can do to your life. Sadly for me, the earlier you get a diagnosis the higher your likelihood of recovery. I think I missed that window a couple of decades ago but I refuse to live a life “half-lived”. If you think CFS is just about “being tired” as the asinine name suggests then please learn a little bit more about this illness by reading the award winning New Yorker article "A Hidden Illness" written by Laura Hillenbrand (yes, the author that wrote “Seabiscuit”, the one that became the movie, and the new book “Unbroken”), her experience as written in this article is amazingly similar to what I myself have experienced.  If you only have time to read one article this week, stop reading this one and read hers instead. (Then come back to this one later.) http://www.cfids-cab.org/MESA/Hillenbrand.html



Single mom, no bike.

For those that know me, I am a farm-raised kind of girl who determined her self-worth by how hard she could work, by how many hours she could labor and sweat without rest. I struggled to maintain that identity the whole time I was ill, unknowingly further harming myself. I just could not understand why I felt so exhausted, I was not a lazy person. I had fallen so far down into the “pit” that just walking a partial block was too much for me to bear. Then came a divorce and I was solely responsible to support and care for two young daughters. I did the best I could and was able to function to care for them, but that was about the limit of the quality of my life. 

Then I met Chris. Chris was an avid cyclist and an incredibly active man. I doubted my ability to keep up with someone like him while I struggled to walk a block. This and other obstacles did not deter him from pursuing me and I felt that if he was willing to weather the storms in my life than the least that I could do was meet him halfway. His love of cycling and his desire to share it with me helped me to overcome my apprehension and I started to ride with him.

The first ride pushed me to my limit and left me shaking, dizzy and disoriented. We had gone only 6 miles. I was ashamed and I felt that surely Chris would not have the patience to put up with a woman so weak. To my shock, he held on with me and his refusal to give up on me fueled my fire. Don’t get me wrong, riding with Chris is tough because he COULD… NOT… GO…. SLOW! He would always assure me that he would just ride ahead and ride back to meet up with me but I hated being left behind, it was too much of an analogy for how I had lived my life for so long with CFS. So I did what the stubborn farm girl in me always did when challenged, I hauled ass. Months later I had managed to barter for a nice little hybrid and I was pulling thirty and forty mile rides averaging 17 to 19 mph. I named the bike “Effie” because on her I felt “effortless”.  On straight-aways I could maintain 22 to 23 miles per hour and on downhills I was a brick that knew no fear of fast curves. In that way I was able to keep up with Chris aka “the Kite” and rebuild myself into something of an athlete.

For a while, I forgot I had this mystery illness. I worked teaching at a smaller local college, often commuting on Effie and for play I ate up the trails with a joy of freedom I had never before known. Then Effie was stolen and, for a while, I lost my heart.

Looking back, I can’t help but think that the electric shock I felt in my heart when I discovered my beloved bike was gone had jump started “Steve” back to life. A few months later I became ill with pneumonia and fell right back into the pit that I had thought I had forever escaped.  Illness, miscarriage, disability and bankruptcy awaited me in the pit and it seemed that every time that I could start to climb out again I was caught by the ankle and pulled back down into the sulfurous depths.



Newest (and last) Grove addition.

Pregnancy with our son was a blessing of good health as my CFS went into a short remission but the -100% natural- delivery depleted everything I had and I was once again in the hole. Now I was at home, chasing a very active baby boy (who seems to ignore the idea that babies need lots of sleep) at my not-so tender age of 38 with a full onslaught of CFS symptoms while my husband went to work every day to support our large, blended family. Honestly, it is hard to want to keep fighting when you are that exhausted.

Then my father-in-law, ironically also named “Steve”, posted a guest blog and introduced us to the www.livestrong.com site while talking about his own challenges to be healthy. Thinking of the considerable challenges he lives with, of how hard he fights to stand back up every time his health and heart faltered how dare I wallow in the “Pit of Steve” and not fight back too? Newly armed with a diagnosis –and with that a better idea of how to manage living with CFS- and a new account with the Livestrong.com website I began to track what I ate, what I drank and what I did each day. As Steve (the good one) urged in his blog article I was brutally honest with myself and I logged in every day for two weeks. I learned so much about not just what I ate, but how I ate. I was able to whittle away too-large portion sizes and limit the vices that packed in the calories. I went from an average of 2,000 calories per day to under 1,700 per day. I have lost three pounds in those 14 days.

The exercise is trickier; I have to be careful not to exhaust my small reserves. For two weeks now I have been slowly ramping up with yoga and then added Tai Chi. Now, I am ready for more. Today is day fifteen and will be my first gym ball workout but all of this is just working up the strength and breath to get back on a bike. We have not yet been able to afford to replace my beloved hybrid Effie so I am stuck with loaners but anything that gets me back on the trails is a worthy steed indeed.  

Before I wrap this up I wanted to thank Eric Taylor for sharing his story with us. His misfortune with his bike inspired not just a blog about his challenges but yet another blog about some of my own trials. This spring, Eric, I will see you on the trail! Stay strong.