My daily caloric expenditure is at probably the lowest it’s been since before I gave birth, now that Allie’s down to a few minutes’ worth of nursing mornings after she gets out of bed and nights before she goes to bed. I can no longer eat with the carefree attitude I did when I was nursing/pumping full-time, when I paid attention to the quality of calories, but not much to the quantity, knowing it was mostly coming out in the form of milk anyway. So of course, the weight’s coming back on. Granted, the all-time low I was in during my PPD days could not be sustained cuz it just wasn’t healthy to get to that weight by wasting away. I think the lowest I’d been was something like 114 lbs. Now I’m easily in my 120s, but I’m not sure what the exact weight is because every scale at home is out of batteries. All I know is that I’m jiggly about the lower abdomen and general stomach area, pants are tight around the thighs, and looking at myself grosses me out. I actually go to the gym whenever I’m able, but it’s inconsistent as my perma-lunch-date is still into eating as opposed to gymming at lunchtime. But whenever he’s unavailable for lunch, I am always, always at the gym. I also run a hilly 4.3 miles a few times a week. Nevertheless, the weight is crawling on, driving the measurements up. I’m pretty unhappy. It’s starting to feel like back in the old days when I could not figure out why no matter what it seemed I did, no matter how well I ate, I just kept gaining weight. (It caused me to check into my thyroids, and test results came back borderline hypothyroidism, which means I couldn’t be medicated for it since I wasn’t fully in the hypothyroidism range.) I thought I’d found the roots to that problem years ago by cutting out fast foods, sodas, and most processed foods, because after that, with or without strenuous gymming, my weight was pretty much stable in the low-mid 120s. Maybe the pregnancy screwed with my body’s equilibrium.

Anyway, I am now getting some help with two related apps on my smartphone. The first is one I’ve used before, called Cardiotrainer (free). It tracks, graphs, maps my exercise, and keeps me motivated by putting a little badge for weekly calories burned right on my status bar. The badge color changes each “level” up I achieve that week. Just yesterday, I downloaded a corresponding app that integrates exercise with diet/nutrition, called Noom Weight Loss. Noom takes into account your goals and lifestyle, then recommends for you a breakdown of what types of food to eat each day, how many calories a day, and how much exercise to do/calories to burn a day to get to your goal. It’s easy to use, very visual, and educational. I’ve learned by just using their food log that I have NOT been eating properly. I haven’t put a ton of thought into what I eat lately; I’ve gotten lazy and just had 2 categories in my head of “good” and “bad” food. My lunch today, for example, I would’ve thought was so good for me it was excellent. I had rare Cajun ahi tuna, a side salad (instead of chowder), and grilled veggies (instead of fries). I also had an unsweetened latte and a piece of sourdough bread. I knew those were the “extras” but it wasn’t like I put sugar on them.
According to Noom, I should be eating a proportion of 50% “green” category foods, 35% of “yellow” category foods, and 15% “red” category foods. Foods dense in nutrition with a lot of bulk to fill up the tank are color-coded green; foods still somewhat healthy but less nutrient-dense are yellow; red foods are the fats and things that may be somewhat necessary, but not in hefty quantities. What did my lunch score? The red category was all right, but the quantities in the yellow and green groups are flip-flopped. I was shocked.
Green: side salad (barely registered, since apparently it’s mostly air), grilled carrots, zucchini, broccoli, cauliflower. That’s it.
Yellow: sourdough bread, the 2% milk in my latte, AND the tuna. Even tho it’s not fried in oil. (Fried or battered fish would’ve popped it into the “red” category.)
Red: the blue cheese dressing, bit of butter used on my bread and the butter or oil used in the veggie grilling.
I tried to adjust for dinner and had brown rice and quinoa “stir-fried,” oil-free, with carrots, green onions, and lean beef, a cup of unsweetened soy milk, and some strawberries. That ended up surprising me again, with only the beef in the red group and everything else in the green, so I ended up with no yellow. =P Overall, the day sort of balanced out.

The other thing that surprised me is what Noom’s built-in pedometer revealed. Doctors recommend that each person walk 10,000 steps a day, which I’d heard of. The pedometer also set that as my daily goal. Okay, my job’s pretty sedentary, but I did walk more than normal today up and down and around San Clemente Pier/beach after I had lunch there*, while waiting for Mr. W’s “emergency” root canal to be done at a nearby specialist’s office. (Yes, we had to take the afternoon off work for that, since we’d carpooled when he’d decided he was in so much pain he had to call for an urgent appointment. But that’s what happens when you wait 2 decades before seeing a dentist.) By the time I got home, it pedometer shows approximately 3500 steps walked. Since 10K is a number recommended for the average American, and the average American isn’t very active, I figure I’ll just make it to 10K steps by just running a mile or so. I’d already run over 4 miles yesterday and I don’t like to run every day, since I know running is tough on joints. But I’m game for a short, leisurely 10 minute mile-long run. I set off, keeping an eye on the pedometer. Half an hour and 2.8 friggin’ miles later, I gave up at approximately 7500 steps. If almost 3 miles is only 4000 steps, then 10K steps is 7-8 miles! The doctors want EACH AMERICAN to walk 7-8 MILES per DAY? Who has time for that?! If people walked 7-8 miles a DAY, then of COURSE there would be no obesity problem in this country. Geesh!
I’ll try again tomorrow. =P

Noom has a really cute widget called “Bikini” which works off a point system with Noom activities. You get points for “showing up” every day, logging in your meals, extra points for jobs well-done, exercise done, etc. The widget appears as a one-piece swimsuit on a clothes hanger as your icon, and as you earn more points and presumably get healthier and more fit, the swimsuit (from my understanding) gets smaller and smaller to figuratively show off your new bod, until it becomes a tiny bikini. When you’ve reached the point goal, supposedly some “surprise” happens. That’s a great motivation for us curious people. I’ve created an extra page on my smart phone for just this fitness stuff:

* Here are some pics of my Monday afternoon after I had to leave jury selection in a long civil personal injury trial (a train conductor suing the train corporation for injuries sustained on her fall while on the job).
Some guy insisted on taking this photo for me when he was walking by and saw me messing with my cameraphone. The woman he was with did not wait for him and walked on. I don’t think she much appreciated his being nice to me.

Don’t you love how guys always shoot from their level down so the woman always looks like she has a giant head and tiny feet? A woman would’ve shot from straight across.
I had some time after I got back to the car so I did some reading from this bench, with this view.

Sigh. I WILL get a proportionately smaller waistline back. I will.