My Daily Bread

Due to some problems with acid reflux I have been trying to be careful about what I eat to avoid problems.  However I was a little too careful and lost some weight which I cannot afford to do.  I have been discouraged trying to eat enough to try to gain some weight.  Janice showed me the Live Strong website that she has been using for over a month to track what she eats each day.   This website has a section called MyPlate  that you can enter the foods you eat each day and it will total the daily calories, fat, protein, carbohydrate, fibre, etc.  There is a huge database of every kind of food including different brand names of prepared and packaged foods that you can select from in entering what you ate each day.   You can select target daily calories based on if you want to lose weight, maintain weight, or gain weight.

I have now been using the Live Strong MyPlate website for a week to track what I eat and see if I am meeting the calorie requirements to gain weight.  Initially the website just has an estimate based on height and weight with 500 calories per day added to gain approximately 1 pound per week.  This is just an estimate because different people have varying metabolism and  activity levels.  But the calorie target can be adjusted with experience.   An example for one day is shown below.  Basically you select the item you ate or the closest to it in their database and the portion size.  Once you get used to the database it does not take much time each day to do the entries. 

So far I am up about 2 pounds but the real test is to see if I can sustain it.  In the past if I was up 2 pounds the next week I would be back down again.  My hope is that using the Live Strong website to track what I eat each day I can be more consistent in eating the required daily calories.  In addition I am learning more about how I am doing in terms of target amounts of daily protein, fat, carbohydrate, fibre, etc.  So it is not just the amount I eat but a healthy balance of foods that meet the overall needs of my body.