Welcome to the first of I hope many diet and exercise weekly posts. As I noted previously, in the past week or so I have started trying to lose weight. Currently I am using two websites to track my progress. The first is Traineo, which has nifty graphs which show the progress in many different logs. Traineo has a very high caloric recommendation for me, almost 3500 calories. I almost never go above the calorie recommendation here. Traineo also is highly encouraging to exercise. However, it lacks a large component of calorie tracking for me: daily ingestion. This leads me to use a second site: TheDailyPlate. DailyPlate has an insane amount of foods in it’s database, I suspect seeded from USDA database at first, but updated by different users. The site allows you to add your own food and then everyone can use your data. I’ve added one or two items I think since I started. TheDailyPlate also has a caloric recommendation for me, which is sitting at 2600 calories or so. I’ve been below my net calories on both of these sites daily.

Along with watching my caloric intake, I’ve started exercising on a daily basis. It is actually much easier than I thought it would be, mostly because no one uses the exercise room during my “normal” workout time. The equipment in there isn’t the greatest, but it works for burning calories and aerobics, which is what I’m aiming for. My weekly routine is currently 4 days fat burning, 3 days aerobic exercise. My fat burning is on a treadmill, going at about 2.5 miles an hour which is just a slightly faster walk than normal for me, and keeping my heart rate in the “fat burning zone” which is generally below 140. Because I’m so out of shape, I don’t need to work that hard. Because it’s not as much work, I tend to do the walking for 45-60 minutes. The aerobic exercise is a 24 minute program on the stationary bike.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like I’m making that much progress. The Traineo graphs aren’t exactly correct. I’ve actually lost net 0.5 pounds on the scale in the exercise room, which at first I subtracted 4 pounds because I obviously am wearing clothes and shoes while I’m on it. I would weigh in the morning, but the scale that I used before is very unreliable for some reason - I can get on it, weigh, and instantly get on it again, and have the change be 4 pounds or more. I’m hoping to find a more reliable scale at a reasonable price that can handle my weight. The problem with all the cheap scales is that they’re not reliable or they don’t go over 330 pounds, which I’m above of course.

I’m trying to be open with my weight and weight loss throughout the process. Towards that goal, I’m adding this to my sidebar: