Background

A little background: in April of this year I decided to test a theory I had long held about the importance of motivation in trying to lose weight. During my last physical my doctor told me that based on my BMI, I was borderline obese (what do they expect – they make you weigh with all your clothes on!). She also said my cholesterol levels were a little on the high side, and she could put me on statins, or I could lose 30 pounds and come back for a re-check in 6 months. She suggested that if I just stopped drinking alcohol, I could lose the weight pronto. Easy for her to say!

The appointment took place in February, and of course it took me a couple of months to decide to act on her advice. Around that time my brother Hank (www.issuetrak.com) introduced me to Facebook, and the old wheels started spinning.

Trained as an Industrial Engineer at the University of Michigan (Go Blue!), I remembered about the Hawthorne Effect. Look it up on Wikipedia if you want the details – but in a nutshell some industrial engineers were trying to improve productivity at this huge GE Plant, and kept meticulous production records to help them study the impact of certain things. They turned up the lights – and sure enough productivity increased. They turned the lights back down – and guess what – productivity increased again! They concluded it was the attention from management, knowing what was being watched, that led to the improved performance. We see the same effect when SurvivalWare is used in a small business – when you make explicit what the performance measures are, and make them visible to all who can impact performance, you see improvements over time.

So I thought that if I did nothing more than post my weight on Facebook (www.facebook.com) every day, I would be forced to make good decisions throughout the day in order to avoid embarrassment the next. I started out at 224.5 on April 8, 2009. I know what you’re thinking: I must be shameless to start with in order to post a weight like that, and how could I possibly be less embarrassed if I get it down to still-chunky 220? Well, it worked for me – for a while, anyway.

I got myself to start by NOT setting an outlandish weight loss goal (e.g. 30 pounds in 6 months). I’m in the software business after all (http://survivalware.com). I try not to get too worked up about deadlines. Rather, I made to commitment to post my weight on Facebook every day for 30 days – and then decide if it was worth continuing. How hard could that be?

That worked for a bit – I actually lost 15 pounds in 90 days. The encouragement from friends and family was really helpful. My brother Hank (www.issuetrak.com) asked me to see what the impact of not drinking alcohol would be. Don’t you love it when family members make suggestions about how you should live your life?! But I had opened myself up for that type of thing by posting on Facebook (www.facebook.com) to begin with. Plus he had a point – I would gain information about the impact, and then I could decide if it was worth it. Plus I had the added benefit of an opportunity to prove that I wasn’t a total souse. I stopped for 10 days. I finally gave in with encouragement from my wife (it’s not every night we go out to dinner – you’re telling me you can’t have a glass or two of wine?). It was at a Macaroni Grill or something like that where they put a huge open bottle of wine on the table and have you keep track of what you drink on the honor system. I’m only human, after all. Those 10 days did help with the weight loss.

But I found I would rather cut back elsewhere – say on the peanuts that normally accompany the alcohol consumption. Or maybe up the exercise to compensate. Hank (www.issuetrak.com) suggested that I post the number of miles I rode my bike, so I started doing that as well.

One problem was that I was uncomfortable with the unpredictability of my daily weight. It didn’t always correlate with the previous day’s performance. I felt like I needed a better measure to monitor and control.

The other problem was trying not to sound like a self-absorbed dork when reporting my weight and bike miles each day on Facebook (www.facebook.com).

Toward the end of July I experimented with calorie counting. I was in the habit already of logging my daily bike riding, so I just needed to track the occasional walk with the wife or mowing of the lawn. I use a push mower and awarded myself the same 600 calories per hour that you get for jogging (400 for biking, 200 for walking). I decided I could handle the calorie counting, and made the commitment to do it for 30 days, and track my actual vs. theoretical weight.

See my last post for the month by month account of what I did:

http://survivalware.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/survivalware-diet-progress-through-october-2009

http://www.survivalware.com/rustysblog/2009/11/03/rustys-diet-a-soft-landing-after-losing-30-pounds-in-6-months

The SurvivalWare Diet

In a nutshell the SurvivalWare diet is this:

invest the time and effort to determine your food intake and how much time you exercise.
Log calories and exercise minutes every day. Write down somewhere (paper or in a computer file) the Total Calories Consumed and Minutes of Exercise by each of three main categories (walking, biking, running).
Do the analysis: keep a running tally of how many calories you have burned vs. consumed.
Set a goal based on your desired weight loss over 30 days. (I did 10 pounds one month, but I had to average 3 hours a day of bike riding to achieve it. 3 to 5 pounds a month is a more reasonable pace).
Calculate the calories you need to burn in excess of calories consumed by taking the total for the month divided by 30 to get an average per day. That is your daily goal.

I found two things really helpful when tracking food calories:

the CalorieKing food database (www.calorieking.com) and
buying a food scale. I loved mine until it broke recently. I bought it on Amazon.com for less than $40. I might try to upgrade next time.

Also, it helps that I like to cook, and that enables me to jot down ingredients and read from the food labels as I prepare dinner. Also, I find that if you prepare dinner for your spouse every night, it is hard for the spouse to be mad at you for any length of time. Unless, of course, you overcook the salmon or overspice the chili.

Restaurant meals were tougher. Not all restaurants publish the nutritional contents of their meals, or there may be a lag when a new menu item is added – and of course, that’s what everyone orders, the new stuff. But it was amazing what I could find out with my iPhone using the Food Scanner app. ($2.99 from Apple’s App store). It helps kill the time between placing your order and having it served to you. Plus what social interaction – such as lunch or dinner with a spouse or friends – can you have today that doesn’t lead to at least one Google search? Food Scanner gave me an excuse to play with the iPhone, and then I naturally would keep it out just in case.

You can search for Caesar Salad and you get to choose from about 12 different restaurants. If you don’t find the exact establishment you are eating at, you can compare yours (when it comes) to the pictures of the others and pick one that looks closest.

Food Scanner also claims to read the UPC codes on labels that come on packaged foods. I found that feature to be unreliable in my tests. Also, if you have the label in front of you, there in plain text is the serving size and number of calories, and it is really easy to jot that down on a scrap of paper. That’s what I do – just jot down what I eat soon after every meal, or during the meal preparation. Then once a day I tabulate all the scraps, and look up any calories that need looking up (e.g. fresh fruit). I try to remember everything I ate and drank. Depending on your memory, and how many drinks you have – you may be able to jot things down just once a day without having to do it throughout the day. When you get all that in one place, record the total calories consumed in a spreadsheet.

It gets easier over time. It is amazing how you tend to eat the same thing for breakfast or lunch every day (with a few variations). I’ve learned to estimate fruit weights and serving sizes just through repetition.

I never did find a food logging program I liked – either on the iPhone or on the PC. I found my hand method of recording to be a good hybrid approach that fit my style. I’d say don’t bother with entering into a computer every single food item that you eat – it is the total calories each day that counts.

When I was at my PC, I used the Calorie King database (www.calorieking.com) instead of the iPhone to look up calories because it was more efficient and easy to use (no iPhone keyboard!). It would correct my misspelling of broccoli, and make it easy to express my consumption in standard servings, dry measure, or weight in ounces or grams. For fruit it would show me the weight for small, medium, or large pieces of fruit (e.g. fresh apples) and you could use that to estimate if you didn’t have a food scale.

In my next posting about the SurvivalWare Diet, I plan to make available and explain the actual spreadsheet I used to track my weight loss performance since August, 2009.