Eating Well: Do the Numbers

So it wasn't Zombies this time, it was a trip to the doctor that started the fight.

I need more calcium in order to continue to kick ass, and I need to lower my blood sugar, apparently because I'm too sweet.

For the calcium - that's easy: take a pill. Oh, and cheese. Bonus points on eating more cheese.

This is what Heaven looks like. Really. 

But lowering the blood sugar is going to be a little bit harder. OK, a lot harder, so I put on my foodie nerd disguise and did some reading and surfing and soul searching. And I found the App of My Dreams, and it is NOT Angry Birds.

No, it's MyFitnessPal, a free online tool that can help you set goals, track what you eat and it's nutritional content (they have a huge database so you can load your daily food with some ease and accuracy), log your exercise routine, and your water by the glassful. There is a premium service, but the basic service is pretty flexible and easy to use.  I only wish I could take the data and graph it somehow - the printed reports are just pdfs by day, so it's hard to see what you did this week, or over the past month, in terms of making progress.

Yes, I had an 812 calorie breakfast. Back off. 

There's a social networking side of it too, but I'm not big on that - too friendly.

OK so they obviously need a librarian to re-set the data - Ken's Steakhouse Lite Northern Italian Salad Dressing is in there about 20 times scrambled up in a 20 different ways, including spellliing misteaks. So, even if you've added it in your Food Diary (the program will let you re-use the entry without having to search for it every time) it can be hard to find later. Salad Dressing, Italian, Northern Italian, Lite, Ken's Steakhouse, in that order. Yes, OK, my cover is blown: I'm a librarian by day - by the power of Zeus this organizing thing is a curse!!! But the nutritional content seems accurate - just watch for the "homemade" entries, which likely won't have much behind them except calories.

Basal? Really???

The exercise database is big, too, but does NOT include fighting crime, so I've replaced it with Elliptical, FYI. Here are the goals of a typical middle aged female superhero in upstate NY:

Yeah, well, maybe not.  (:

And low and behold, there was light - really bright light, and for a fire goddess and food nerd it just about burnt my eyeballs: too many simple carbs! So I've been cutting back on all those things that I thought made life worth fighting the forces of evil for: cookies and ice cream and pastries and white bread and white rice and potatoes and crackers and candy and chips and french bread and brownies and oh yeah, pie and cake.  And you know what??? I guess I found out that I really like oatmeal and brown rice and wheat pasta and winter squash, I'm eating more veggies and getting more fiber, and I actually feel better. I lost a few pounds, too. And while entering all that info about what you eat and do everyday can become as obsessive as a librarian cleaning up a database, I'm suggesting you won't need to do it forever, but long enough to see what you're doing right, and doing wrong, while you develop better habits.

OK so the wine is going to be a problem. I'm working on that.

Zena, Goddess of Fire

P.S. The database even had Mysore Dosa. Is that not amazing???