Tuesday, April 3, 2012

About Percentages


If you’ve ever been on a diet, you already know all about calorie counting.  It’s probably the oldest “diet program” in the book.  And, I’ve discovered, it doesn’t have a lot of fans.  Counting calories is a lot of work.  You have to remember to log everything that you put in your mouth, and then look up the calories (although that really should be in the reverse order), and then hope by the time dinner rolls around, you still have a calorie or two to spare to eat something. Now while it’s true I “calorie count”, the program I am on is only half about calorie counting.  The other half is about percentages.

There are many ways to eat 1200 calories.  Not all, however, will result in healthy weight loss.  Some of those ways won’t even result in any weight loss.  That’s where paying attention to your percentage goals comes into play.  When I talk about percentages, I am referring the protein/carb/fat percentages that make up the 1200 calories.

When we started, I was high in carbs, because I just couldn’t give them up.  We started with 45% of my calories in the carb category.  Last week I changed it to the more traditional 40/30/30 plan (protein/carb/fat), but had a hard time eating all that protein.  This week we changed it to 35/30/35 and we’ll see how it goes.  I'll probably experiment with the percentages from time to time to see what happens.

This is where, yet again, Myfitnesspal is so handy.  It tracks not only the calories but the percentages.  However you decide to set up the percentage goals, it’s important to make your food plan work with the percentages, not just the calories.  If you aren’t seeing weight loss and you are still within your calorie goal, you may want to consider playing around with the percentages (assuming you were faithful to them in the first place).  If you cut the carbs, even by just 5%, you will probably start losing again.

I lost two pounds last week, which was a pleasant surprise.  Here is another before/in progress picture. 

2 comments:

  1. I also track my food on my fitness pal. How do I get it to do the percentages?

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  2. It will do the percentages automatically. I'm not sure what they are pre-set for, but you can change them to whatever you want. Go to your profile and then click the "goals" tab. Then click the green "change goals" button and then click Custom. You can change the percentages from there. To see where you are at on a daily basis with your percentages, just go to your food Diary. If you are using the phone app, you can't change the goals from there, but you can see where you're at from the Home screen, and then "Daily" at the top of the screen.

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