okayTotal weight lost: 33.4 lbs from my starting weight of 319 on July 1, 2014.
Average weight lost: 0.4 lbs/week.
So, as mentioned previously, Weight Watchers has made itself anti-useful, and so I have canceled my account. (At least I think I have; their site is vague about it, and I intend to thump them about that later today.)
At
laurie_robey's suggestion I have switched to a tracking plan called MyNetDiary, which works along the same basic principles that the WW tracker was built on, except instead of calculating a single "points" value it breaks each food down into calories, fat, carbs, and protein, which are all tracked individually. Like the WW tracker, it has a vast database of foods already in place, but they are mostly user-entered foods so it takes a little more vetting.It also has a weight loss plan, although it's a relatively simplistic one based solely on caloric deficit. You put in your weight, age, gender, and "activity level" (self-diagnosed, but with guidelines) and it compares your daily record with the Accepted Normal Values™ put out by whomever it is who puts out these things. (These are the same people who claim I should be 185 lbs, however, so I am dubious.) If you consume fewer calories than you expend, you are "on target." It also has a recommended minimum, and changes your target when you enter "extra exercise" which isn't covered by your normal activity. (For instance, if your activity level is "sedentary" and you do an aerobic workout.) My current activity level is "active" due to the Starbucks job, although that will switch back to "sedentary" when I go back to writing/art full time.
So now my big goal for 2016 is to start weaning myself off of carbs, because quite frankly, I eat a lot of them. However, I'm not going to jump off the low-carb cliff as advocated by South Beach, Atkins, Ideal Protein and the like. I've attempted that– without having been warned that it would make me angry, exhausted, and stupid, thank you marketing department– and I'm not going to go through that again. But I am going to be working on finding low (or at least "lower") carb alternatives to a lot of my carb heavy "go-to" current foods.
The hardest part of that is going to be finding handy snacks, because hunger leads to instant headache for me and I can't be in the kitchen making meals all the time. A lot of the low-carby peeps recommend keeping bacon on hand for that purpose, but I am not convinced. We'll see.
In marginally-related news, I woke up in afib again today. -.- Hopefully I can find a way to fix this and not lose the whole day to being groggy in bed. :P
-The Gneech