Ok, I've been on two diets in my adult life and lost weight and of course gained it all back. I'm pretty much at the top of my weight scale again and need to lose weight.
First diet was Atkins. I lost a lot of weight, but it was bad for my liver eating a ton of red meat.
Second diet I was on, I went to a place called Medical Weightloss. They had a diet that they told you what to eat and I lost almost 40 pounds in 3 months. But according to them, I cheated and they threw me out of the program (after paying $700) and didn't tell me how to level off the diet and bring back in foods I needed for a balanced diet and keep the weight off.
Well, I'm thinking the only diet that could possibly work is I have to be able to eat whatever I want. Ok, just hear me out. This is what I envision.
There are many apps where you log your food. My Fitness Pal is one. You enter your food and you see how many calories you went over.
What I'm looking for is, say for instance my wife makes dinner and we have meatloaf, french fries, some vegetables, and maybe pie. (Just making stuff up.) But maybe before eating anything, I'll punch that into the app. It will come back and say I can only have 5 ounces of meat loaf, 1 cup of fries, 1 cup of vegetables and one spoonful of pie. The app would allow me to eat whatever I wanted but would restrict how much I could have to have a balanced diet, be healthy, and lose weight if I eat the portions of whatever is in front of me that the app would tell me. Maybe the app would say that my starches are over and to completely omit the fries for dinner. Does such an app exist?
I'm really bad at food. It's amazing I know what a starch is. I can't cook to save my life. I just know what a starch is from medical weightloss.
I'm not aware of any app that does all of that for you, but to be honest, I don't think you need it. You just need an app that logs the calories and macronutrients, and then you can enter different amounts of the food in question and see what they add up to. Once you've been doing this for a while, you'll get a good feel for which foods are more calorie-dense than others, and it'll stop being such a mystery. Have you given My Fitness Pal a try? I wouldn't get too hung up over starches either, just find a way of eating that you can sustain comfortably, and then you can always adjust once you've settled into that.
Honestly, that sounds a lot like Weight Watchers. With the guidelines you get when you join, and the number of Points, you can play around with the eTools and see how much of everything you can eat and stay in your Points limit. You can play around with the amounts of each food until you get your target amount, and consider that meal pre-tracked!
MFP actually kind of does this. If you log your food before you eat, you'll notice it may say something like "you've exceeded your sodium goal for the day, try to stay below *insert number here*". Of course, it really only is helpful in that way at dinnertime since earlier in the day you haven't had much food yet!
If you are as bad as you say you are with food then why not find recipes that fit your criteria.
While the idea itself it not bad of it working out from what you have. To have long life weight loss its better to understand what you are eating/doing.
A good example would be "ok app how much of a Big Mac and fries can I eat for dinner tonight". Even though most of us know that eating a Big Mac is bad for us by your apps logic it would be ok to eat 0.4 of a big mac. But thats not proper sustainable nutrition.
Trust me go online/buy a book and spend a little time understanding what you are putting into your body. One day you mobile phone may run out of power/break and you will have literally no idea what to make for dinner.
Agreed. I found that using dieting software with nutritional analysis helped me understand nutrient density and which foods worked well for weight loss. For instance, people commonly tell you to eat a handful of almonds before bed to help you sleep. I had no idea how that was full of calories! Almonds are high in fat in particular, and fat has more calories per gram. Vegetables, on the other hand, are pretty low in calories. So I use vegetables liberally in my cooking, but put in a smaller amount of nuts. They're a good food, they're just very nutrient-dense and thus better in smaller quantities.
It clicks fairly quickly, don't worry. You do have to keep logging what you eat, otherwise you slip off track, but it gets easy before too long.
Try the Macros app. If you input your food it'll tell you the calories, carbs, fat and protein you have eaten. Plus how many you have left according to your dietary goals. That's probably as close as you can get. It takes some time to set up, as you can either enter food values online or you enter your own foods. You don't have to enter components either, so if you say buy lasagne from Costco you can create an entry called Lasagne (Costco) with the g of protein, fat, carb, fiber, sugars (last 2 are optional) with your serving size. Then the next time you have it, you click on Lasagne (Costco) enter 1 serving or whatever and it'll deduct the macros (pro/fat/carb/calories) from your goal daily totals.
Once you enter your foods, you can "reverse engineer it" to get what you are looking for -- you can add foods to your daily food diary and see the impact on your goal macros. So while it won't directly tell you that you can have 1/2 a serving of lasagne for dinner, you can enter 1 serving, check your macros, then edit down to 1/2 a serving to get within your target Macros, or delete the item completely.
Might work? Probably the best you can do I think.
I have it from Google Play (Android) and it's called, literally, Macros. Probably available on Apple too.
What you're looking for is some outside way to manage portion control, but the fact is that we all have such a way in our houses: the average-sized dinner plate. Just limit yourself to what will fit on your dinner plate without going vertical (so, no piling it high). This goes for everything---even a piece of fruit you might want to have after dinner. If it doesn't fit on your dinner plate, take off something else you were going to eat and put it there. Also, don't have second helpings and don't snack.
What I'm describing is something called "NoS diet"; Google it. It seems like it is just what you're looking for.
I use FatSecret and it provides a rollup of carbs, fats, and proteins, which might be helpful. It works well for me and helps me make a decision on what to eat/not eat based on how many grams of carbs, fats, and proteins I want to consume.
Looking for an app that would work like this?
