Week 1 Gluten Free Results and Lose It App

Yesterday marked 1 week of being Gluten Free, and the scale says I’ve lost 6 lbs. I would say this is motivation enough to go for another week. This diet has not been quite as hard as I thought, though it is still very present in my mind that this is temporary – the thought of pasta brings a tear to my eye and I may have spent a substantial part of my Monday daydreaming about cupcakes.

Aside from avoiding gluten, I’ve become mildly obsessed with recording my food intake on my new “Lose It!” App on my iPhone. The basic app is free, and it tracks your food intake and exercise per day and per week, showing you a pie chart of your total diet divided into carbs, fats, and protein. This is particularly helpful when you’re trying to watch carbs, as it does all the work for you, especially on things like fresh veggies that don’t come with a nutrition label.

The app took a few days to get used to, but now I love it. You can look up many restaurant foods – say “Starbucks Tall Skinny Vanilla Latte” and it will upload the exact nutritional information. Otherwise, you will probably have to build your meal – 8oz chicken, 2 cups spinach, 1/2 cup chick peas, etc. – but this teaches you how many calories each component is worth. I’ll admit, I really thought I had a handle on the “cost” of everything I was eating, but I’d gotten fairly out of touch.

Some foods aren’t exact, and the calorie ranges for some exercises aren’t perfect either- but if the label on the pudding you just ate said 60 calories in 1 cup, and the app says pudding should be 120 per cup, you can adjust the serving size down to reflect the accurate amount of calories. Likewise, if the “calories burned” listed for “Walking” don’t match your heart rate monitor, you can just increase/decrease the time. The app might not be perfect, but you can get it pretty close. I also find that the planning aspect of this app is great – if I know I’m going to have a big dinner, I can input the components in the morning and see what calories I have left to play with for the day. Often this leads to more motivation to go to the gym, so I can eat a little more and not go over my calorie count. Maybe this is backwards logic? Oh well.

I’ll admit that this kind of calorie counting is wildly out of character for me. I don’t love that I’m so into it right now. But it’s getting me some much needed results, so I’m going to keep it up for a while. Search for “Lose It!” on your iPhone and try it yourself.