Originally Posted by mrodgers

5'8" and 222.8 lb this morning. Started last summer at 247 and started riding the end of summer. I lost focus over winter and started logging again this past week.

I wanted to get a rough estimate on what I normally ate for meals so installed MyFitnessPal. I try to overestimate but I don't weigh food. For meals we eat all fresh homemade and a lot home grown. My wife might buy something packaged but then next time, she is replicating it from scratch. We rarely eat out and rarely eat fast food. Our beef is grass fed and raised by my father-in-law. We had chickens but got rid of them when my wife was pregnant. We jumped into the chickens again for eggs but they ended up all roosters so I butchered. We now get fresh eggs from my brother-in-law. What we don't grow in the family is organic when we can.8

MyFitnessPal told me I should eat 1800 calories to lose 1-2 lb per week. I found that I ate about 1600 breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That means the weight gaiin was all junk food. It is a real eye opener when you actually look and realize those 5 Oreos you just ate, then the 5 more you ate because the first 5 were so good is more calories than you ate earlier for dinner. Junk food is an easy way to eat an enormous amount of calories very quickly.

I don't know how accurate I am estimating, but last year while using the app, I was losing 10 lb per month.

MyFitnessPal if the food is in a package, you can scan the bar code to get the info. For nonpackaged food, I searched and would select the largest calorie number.

If you eat the same meals often, it is very easy. It shows you recent anf frequent foods that you've selected. You can also copy a meal to another day. Most of our meals are meat, starch, and veggie so I'm not having to log a bunch of stuff to make my meal.

If I ride, sometimes I'll eat something in the evening, not all the time. If I am close to the 1800 net though, I won't eat anything. Without logging such as over winter, I would eat something just because I like food and don't have any numbers to say, "hey, you shouldn't eat that."