Watching What We Eat

My friend Tracy was the first to introduce me to an app called MyFitnessPal. It's a free calorie counter, diet and exercise tool to help you lose, maintain or gain weight.

Since the start of the year, I've kept a relatively accurate account of how many calories I take in and expend. I say relatively accurate because, like most online calorie counters, the database is primarily self-reported foods and meals with caloric calculations all over the place. A piece of specialty brand sourdough bread, for instance, registers as 110 calories on the package but 300 on MyFitnessPal. And I'm having a hard time believing a couple handfuls of my beloved kumquats cost me as much as a chai tea latte with whole milk.

We also tend to cook from scratch at my house, so trying to align our homemade veggie pizza with one in the database produces dubious results. Ditto restaurants. I'm more of a fine dining than fast food consumer, so I have to wing it when I enter those dishes.

But MyFitnessPal does have a few things I like, particularly instantly calculating how many grams of carbs, fat and protein you should have versus what you actually do. Of course, according to this Wall Street Journal article, it really doesn't matter where your calories come from.

And at the end of the day, when you click a button, MyFitnessPal tells you what you would weigh in five weeks if you ate and exercised like that everyday. That can be particularly motivating. I keep my logs private, but many share theirs and that level of accountability can also be a big help for weight loss.

What tools like MyFitnessPal do is force us to be honest and more mindful about what and how much we put in our mouths.

My own observations are backed up by a popular food psychology book I'm currently reading called Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think. Many of you probably already know of it and may have even read it. It outlines various experiments that show we tend to overeat and, importantly, why.

Often it's visual miscues. For instance, MBA students at a sports bar were given a big plate of chicken wings to consume during the Super Bowl. One half continually had their dirty bowls with chicken bones removed; the other kept the carnage on the table. Those who had a visual reminder of how much they had already eaten ate significantly less chicken wings than those whose evidence was erased.

Another interesting tidbit: It takes 20 minutes into a meal for neurotransmitters to let us feel satiated. But the average American takes only 11 minutes to complete a meal. That's why we often go back for seconds or decide on dessert.

You can watch more about some of the experiments on this web site's video player.

I've tried a lot of other calorie counters over the years. And I don't hold any illusions that I'll stick with MyFitnessPal for a long time. But I am slowly losing weight, which is the best way to do so. If you do or did track your calories, let us know what you discovered.