I recently had issues with my stom­ach and while I am now feel­ing some­what bet­ter, I am tak­ing this time to re-evaluate my rela­tion­ship with food and my eat­ing habits.  Since I was a child, I have relied on food for boost­ing my mood and pro­vid­ing com­fort when life chal­lenged me.  Slowly I gained more and more weight, finally top­ping out at more than 250 lbs.  Sur­pris­ingly, no mat­ter how poorly I ate, I never went higher than that, but I dis­cov­ered that I was begin­ning to have trou­ble doing the things I loved.  Some­thing had to change.  Just after the begin­ning of the year, I started hav­ing stom­ach issues, and I have reworked my habits.

While I have not fully changed my crav­ings, I have gone with­out drink­ing soda, and due to my stom­ach, have been liv­ing off soft foods and pro­tein shakes.  At first, I wasn’t sure how I could sur­vive on the rec­om­mended caloric intake var­i­ous sites sug­gested to me.  1200 calo­ries doesn’t seem like much espe­cially after track­ing my food prior to the start of this and dis­cov­er­ing that I was eat­ing close to 3000 calo­ries each day.  No won­der I have a weight problem.

So I’m start­ing to fig­ure out what trig­gers me to eat emo­tion­ally and watch­ing when I actu­ally feel hun­gry ver­sus other emo­tions.  Hap­pily, this has helped me to drop almost 10 lbs.  I down­loaded a few apps to my phone to help with track­ing food (My Fit­ness Pal),  one to track my move­ment through­out the day (Moves), and finally one to help with some exer­cise (Bod­Bot).  It’ll be inter­est­ing to see how much I move around while at work and how much I actu­ally walk each day.  I work at a stand­ing desk, and am gen­er­ally mov­ing around quite a bit.  I am using the free ver­sion of Bod­Bot, and depend­ing on the results, I may upgrade to the paid ver­sion for more detailed analy­sis of my exercise.

In the past, I have used other ser­vices, but I find that thus far, My Fit­ness Pal has had every­thing I eat in their data­base, and so track­ing is super sim­ple with just a bar­code scan.  Moves is doing a decent job of track­ing my move­ment, and I think once I start doing the body weight exer­cises assigned by Bod­Bot, I will have a good group of apps to help me track and stay on track the most impor­tant aspects of my journey.

As I dis­cover more about what makes me want to eat, I am dis­cov­er­ing ways to moti­vate myself to stay on this jour­ney no mat­ter how it can suck at times.  One thing I am tremen­dously grate­ful for is my fiancée.  He loves me just the way I am, but he also under­stands why I need to do this.  He’s been help­ful when I’ve strug­gled with stom­ach pain as well as acted like a con­science remind­ing me that some­thing prob­a­bly isn’t a good choice.