Health Goals Part I - Dietary Goals

I had my final post-surgical follow-up and am now officially cleared to exercise! Huzzah! In celebration of this fact, I am posting my new health goals and plans, in two parts. Here's the first part:

Dietary Goals
I'm fat. I'm fine with it. I have a good life as a fat person which includes great friends, great housemates, and some pretty awesome men who find me attractive as is. So I am not attempting to change my weight through these dietary goals. Let me repeat that: this is NOT about losing weight. I have exactly zero intentions of restricting my eating, counting calories, or depriving myself of the foods I like. Life is too short and chocolate too tasty for that nonsense.

Game of Thrones Meme: What do you say to dieting? Not today!

I am trying to eat in ways that make my body feel good. I've found that doing so actually does involve a bit of regulating what I eat. I've noticed that I feel like shit when I go too long without eating, when I fail to drink enough water, or when I eat certain foods *coughSOYcough* so I make sure I regulate that. I've found that I do best with a higher protein diet, more of some micronutrients (potassium, vitamin B, iron), and less of other micronutrients (salt). I also tend to eat when hungry, angry, lonely, or tired (aka HALT) as a holdover from other stupider addictive behaviors, so I try to stop and assess whether I'm actually hungry or whether one of those other factors is making me think I'm hungry before I start eating.

Tiny turtle eating a ginormous strawberry.

To track what I'm eating, I use the myfitnesspal app on my phone.  The app also keeps track of water intake, workouts, and how much you weigh. It even acts as a pedometer - or it would if I carried my phone around with me more. The app has a social feature too if you have friends who use it, so that's cool. So how do I use the app?

Well, I don't track my weight on the app because weight tracking stresses me out and I'm not trying to lose weight. I also don't track my workouts on there because the app will automatically factor those calories burned into your calories for the day and I want to exercise for my health not because I'm trying to burn calories. I do like the water tracking feature, since I feel better when I'm hydrated. I also like the pedometer since it's kind of neat to look at the graph and see how many steps I took each day. But the thing I really love about this app and the reason I use it every day is that it breaks everything you eat down into easy to digest graphs (see what I did there?).

Picture of myfitnesspal app.

There is a daily pie chart showing when you ate the most calories (breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks), a pie chart breaking down what you ate by macronutrients (carbs, proteins, fats) and a chart showing what you ate in micronutrients vs the how much you need. You can customize your objectives to say what you're aiming for in total calories and what percentages you want to be eating of the macro- and micro-nutrients. If you're trying to lose or gain weight you can put your weight and what you want to weigh and your activity level so it'll make goals for you. I chose not to input a weight goal and instead to make up my own objectives based on what my doctor and nutritionist told me. For example, I set the macronutrients to 30% proteins, 30% fats, 40% carbs because I wanted to eat more protein than the original myfitnesspal recommendation. I've left most of the micronutrients alone but I set my salt intake to 2,300 mg per day (lower than it started with) and my potassium to 3,500 mg per day (higher than it started with). I put in the caloric intake my nutritionist said I should do. Basically, this is a nice and customizable app that works for me.

Cat eating salad and looking weird.

Cat eating a snow cone and looking weird.

It should be obvious but in case it isn't, this app is for adults. Not for kids. If your kid's doctor recommends it and you're looking for something similar for kids, you can try Kurbo which is made for kids and which uses a traffic-light system (red is eat rarely, yellow is eat sometimes, green is eat most).

Ok. So far this post has been all about how I track what I eat. What are my actual goals? They are:

* Drink 8+ glasses of water a day.
* Take a daily multivitamin.
* Stick as closely as possible to the macro- and micro-nutrient breakdowns I've set up in the myfitnesspal app.
* Avoid soy, MSG, and foods with long lists of unpronounceable ingredients.
* Eat only when sitting down at a table with no distractions.
* Stop and assess whether I'm actually hungry before eating or getting seconds.
* Eat every four(ish) hours. Aim for something like an 8am, 12pm, 4pm, 8pm eating schedule.
* No food after 10pm.

See? Totally do-able and it focuses on my health, not my weight. If you're interested in modifying your diet, I'd recommend a similar approach. It's so much better and more sustainable than dieting.

Pink spray painted graffiti that says "Riots not diets!"

Do you have dietary goals? If so what are they? Are they health-focused rather than weight-focused?