I consistently record my food intake and weight data in various computer programs.  I have now been doing this consistently every day for almost eight years. ..…. as of the time of this writing, for the past 7 years and 11 months.

The Computer and software program in which I record my food is a useful TOOL. There are many such food journaling programs,  but my own personal choice (at this time) is a program called DietPower. (Update 2018: My Recommended Food Journal for beginners is now  "My Fitness Pal". My behavior of RECORDING my food intake every day forces me to stay aware of my actions, and it keeps me out of Denial. I know what I'm doing, and what I've done, and I continually face my own actions head-on.

 Sitting at the computer and entering the daily data has become a Habit which …most of the time….is an enjoyable one.  It is sometimes emotionally difficult to actually write down Everything I've eaten, but in a way it's similar to a Catholic going to Confession. My frequent input of my total food information often brings a sense of relief and sometimes even personal Absolution, a feeling of pardon or forgiveness.

I am Accountable for my eating BEHAVIOR every day, no matter what it is.
My weights are the RESULTS of my eating Behaviors, and those RESULTS are actually outside my personal control. I am responsible for the food that I put into my mouth (my behavior). I am not responsible for what the scale says (my results) because I cannot control what my body chooses to do with that food.

Therefore,

I am responsible for my Behavior, but not for my Results.

The scale is merely a TOOL that reflects the total weight of one's total body, including fat, water, bones, fecal material etc. It shows the RESULTS of my eating BEHAVIOR.

The scale is without personality. It is not a Judge and Jury of my actions, but is merely a reflection of them.
Ones individual weight on one single day might not be very accurate, but graphing many days of those individual weights gives an extremely accurate picture of the RESULTS of one's eating BEHAVIORS.

Weighing and recording ones weight every day can be emotionally difficult when the scale goes up. This is especially true when the entire weight graph shows an uphill pattern. Watching a downhill, weight-loss pattern feels very rewarding,

but watching an uphill, weight-gain pattern can feel demoralizing.
These are the times when most people choose to stop recording weights.
And, there are days when I feel very reluctant to write down what the scale says.  
There are weeks when I am very unhappy with my weight results,    and I sometimes feel that I'm having an uphill pattern that is unjustified,  but IT IS WHAT IT IS.  I cannot change what I will not face.

People who ACTUALLY keep records of their food intake ALL THE TIME, can gain a great deal of insight into the connection between their body size/weight, and their food intake.

Although I remain open to the knowledge and opinions of nutritional "experts", conventional wisdom or the knowledge and education of any such expert, cannot erase the truth that is shown in long-term detailed personal records.

Due to my consistent daily DietPower journal entries, I now have records of every day of my all of my food eaten since September 20, 2004.  This is just about 1 month short of EIGHT years of personal data.

That data is statistically correct, because all 8 years were handled by me personally, in the same manner.  I've consistently weighed and measured my food, read labels, and followed calorie counting charts.

If I've weighed and measured food incorrectly, or made calorie counting errors (which is impossible to avoid), those inadvertent errors are a consistent part of the long-term process.  Such errors would merely raise or lower the overall caloric levels but does not alter the weight/food-intake relationship.

On my ABOUT ME page here in DietHobby, under the heading RESOURCES, there are a great many links to weight charts and weight graphs showing many details of my first 5 years of personal record keeping.  If you have not done so recently, you might want to review these.  To do so, click the link above.

I also plan to soon write an article  showing detailed charts of my personal food intake, together with a SUMMARY of the relationships between my food intake and weights for the past 8 years.  Watch for it.  

I'm been thinking a lot about what my next steps will be online, after this immediate DietHobby Hacking crisis has passed. 

There are some of you who share my dieting interests and who have been very close to me during this past year while I established this website, and I feel confident of your continued support no matter what I choose to do here. 

I spent many thousands of my hard-earned savings along with more than a year of long days of very hard work to establish this DietHobby website, and to buy the equipment to make the videos that I've posted here and on youtube.

The day before this Hacking happened, I  paid $600 for an order of 2500 custom-made buttons to pass out to my YouTube grandbabies at VidCon 2012, and along with the registration fees, travel expenses, hotel bills that are connected with VidCon, attending this event at the end of next month will be very expensive. 

I don't make any money on this website, or on my youtube channel, and these buttons, along with all of my other expenses and my work have been intended to be a gift of kindness.  

I've spent my entire life working very, very hard to earn a living, and to do what I could to help people with their personal problems and their legal problems. There are many things I could choose to do to enjoy my final years of life, now that I'm retired, and old. 

What I've chosen to do this past year is to share some of my knowledge and support with others.

This was received quite well by many thousands of people of different ages at YouTube, but there were also a few who didn't like me or what I had to say, and those people have been very unkind.  The most disturbing so far, is of course, this recent hacking and destructive vandalizing of what I have worked so hard to build -- simply for the hacker's personal amusement. 

The hacker's mindset does not seem unusual to me, because for a time I practiced criminal law, and I saw a great deal of that type of unkindness and disregard for the rights of others in the people who the court assigned me to defend.

When acting as a court-appointed attorney I've even experienced having to defend the legal rights of paternity of a father who had abused, molested, and then killed his 3 year old daughter. That child was dead. He was in prison for life, but he refused to give up the legal rights to his other 2 small children so they could be adopted. He had no chance of winning, but the law required him to have a lawyer, and the court assigned his case to me.  

I also remember when I first begun my legal practice the court appointed me to defend an adolescent boy after he beat up his grandmother for absolutely no reason except his bad mood, and another time, the court appointed me to defend a 13 year old boy who broke an old lady's arm when he stole her purse, and pushed her over, while riding past her on a bicycle. 

I've visited many clients in prison. You understand… at that time I was a young DEFENSE attorney, and my job was to try to help the one who had committed the criminal act. Dealing with such people is never fun, and this situation reminds me of those past times in my life.

I've been able to turn Dieting into an enjoyable hobby which is a good thing because Dieting is not really a choice for me if I want to maintain my body at a reasonable size. 

I have a great many other hobbies, and they are for my enjoyment  and bring pleasure to myself and others.  One of my hobbies is sewing, Another is gardening. Another is building stained glass windows.  Another is writing.  I've enjoyed learning about computers, and when my nephew was young, I enjoyed playing playstation RPG games with him. The Final Fantasy series was a special favorite. My nephew grew up and became a Marine in Iraq and Afganistan where he received 2 purple hearts.  My most recent hobby has been making videos.

Except for dieting, if a hobby stops being fun, then I choose to engage myself in a different hobby, and right now, I'm not finding Google/YouTube itself to be much fun, and dealing with the haters, trolls and bullies on YouTube is also no fun. 

I believe that haters, trolls and bullies should be avoided and ignored, and if I have to leave youtube and even close down this website to avoid and ignore them, then I am prepared to do that.  There are many other wonderful things in my life that I can focus on.  My 25 years of legal practice contained some very difficult experiences, but now that's over. I'm retired, and I don't have to do that anymore.

So I am thinking about what I want to do to avoid this type of situation in the future, and while I am in the process of writing this, it's keeping me from sitting here on the sofa stuffing myself with cookies for comfort.

I love that picture of the fortune from the cookie that I put at the top of this website.. "I cannot help you, for I am just a cookie"   Life events are often difficult, and I get to choose whether to focus on the negative or the positive.  I remain aware, of course, of both negative and positive, but I can choose to direct my FOCUS toward the positive.

I've made changes to my Weight Range Maintenance Plan. 

Previously the top black "Unacceptable" area was 120 lbs and over, (now that "Unacceptable" area is 126 lbs and over); and the red "LoseWeight" area was 119-116, (now that "LoseWeight" area is 125-120 lbs)

When I grew near to my goal weight, I made a visual graphic of my plan to maintain my weight-loss, by creating a Weight Maintenance Chart much like the one shown above. This turned out to be a very effective way to set specific goal-weight-range numbers into my mind and heart.

I talk more how I did this, and why, in a previous article, "Setting A Goal Range". Read that article to see the original chart and the maintenance weights that I originally set for myself.

This graphic has been very helpful to me for the past six years, and I have worked very hard to stay within the maintenance weight ranges that I set for myself. However, this past two years, ... despite my very best efforts... I've spent most of the time hanging out inside the top red area and the top black area,and I've been unable to sustain much time at all inside my blue maintenance area.

So, I've finally accepted that my age and my activity level might never let me get and keepmy weight down as low as it was during my first few years of maintenance, so I've raised the top of my Maintenance Weight Range Plan by five lbs. I haven't changed the bottom ranges. These will remain the same because they are merely there as a reminder of the general weight guidelines for someone my height.

I fought against raising my weight range for a very long time,but have finally chosen to face my present reality, I haven't given up the struggle to get my weight back down to 115 or lower. I still hope that I can accomplish that. However, I'm tired of hanging out in my upper red and black areas. I am hoping that changing this graphic will give me an added mental push toward making the blue maintenance area my status quo again.

I've been very reluctant to make this change.  Not so much because of the actual 5 lbs,
but because of my fear that ... despite all my continued best efforts ... that my weight will continue to creep upward.

I've decided to face the truth, that my body isn't the same as it was 7 years ago. My maintenance weight has been about 5 lbs higher for the last few years,  so it's time to adjust my maintenance weight range to accurately reflect reality.  Although in a way doing this feels like admitting defeat,  it is actually a step toward success in my ongoing maintenance.

                                   
Our bodies are not Bank Accounts.
Although using financial metaphors often helps describe the dieting process, we don't get immediate feedback for calories eaten or not eaten, except from the immediate and temporary water-waste-gain-or-loss equation which is due to an excessive change in our salt intake, or our food volume.

Each of our bodies assimilates what we eat, whether it is food or a food-like substance. It uses or stores what it can, and discards, or tries to discard, what it can't.

This is a process, and it takes time. The process is complicated, involving enzymes and hormones, some of which haven't even yet been discovered. Although the process is similar for all humans, there are genetic differences between people, and this affects the way that individual bodies function.

That said, here is weight loss in a nutshell:

Eat less.


Find a calorie range for you that you can eat daily that

1.) Does not make you want to die, and

2.) Allows for a reasonable energy deficit
(meaning, you will consume moderately less than you are burning just by living and exercising).

You can start by finding out how much an "average" body like yours burns in its normal everyday state without effort. Just google: BMR and punch in your stats to get this number.  HOWEVER, this number is ONLY an estimate, and due to your own personal genetic equation, your body could easily burn far less.

Work to eat 250 calories less than that number per day.  Eating 250 calories less than your body burns every day will lead to a one-half pound per week weight loss (meaning stored fat loss)… but for most people…the scale will not reflect this loss accurately on a day-to-day basis.. and sometimes..not even on a week-to-week basis.

Move more.


Which essentially means: move more.  By move I mean move, in any way your body likes.  And by more, I mean more, as in - more than you currently do.

If you try to burn an additional 250 calories through exercise each day,  you could lose an additional one-half pound weekly.  HOWEVER, extra exercise makes the body more hungry and more tired. So if you eat a little extra because you exercised, or you spend more time resting during the rest of the day because you exercised, then exercise will be ineffective for weight-loss which is due to a release of stored fat.

Theoretically, a 500 calorie deficit will lead to 1 pound of weight loss from fat storage over a one week period. This is based on the general rule used by science: 1 lb = 3500 calories, so 7 days of burning 500 calories less than your calorie intake creates 1 lb of stored fat loss.

But CAUTION. This is a "general" rule, and the calculation is far more complicated than it appears.

Even when we weigh and measure our food, and track it in a computer program, it is impossible to calculate with precision the exact amount of calories our individual body eats, and even far less possible to precisely calculate the exact amount of calories that our individual body burns in exercise.. even when using computer exercise trackers such as a "Body Bug" etc.

Tracking food and exercise is valuable, but that information will never be precise, or totally accurate.

I used up my inspiration and energy in writing this long e-mail answer, so I'm sharing it here in this article. 

 Someone asked me the following question:

"Can you tell me how many carbs you limited yourself to
when you were on low carb?
Did it work well for you?
I seem to have more luck counting carbs."
 

Here's my answer. 

I think that low-carb is an excellent diet plan, and if it is a workable plan for you, go for it. Personally, whether I'm doing low-carb or not, I've found that it is necessary for me to track my food, and count calories.

All of my own research and experimentation and observation leads me to believe that Calories Count, even when doing low-carb, and IF there is a "calorie edge" to eating low carb, it is a very small one, probably not more than 100 calories a day.

I've seen that people who choose to eat more calories than they burn ...over time... while doing low-carb will still gain weight. Low-carb -- when it's VERY low carb -- tends to be more satiating, and more and more I suspect that --- over time --- it works primarily because people ingest less food.

My experiments with low-carb have been during maintenance at normal weight, so it can't be fairly compared with someone in the weight-loss phase.

I am intrigued by Gary Taubes' position about carbs, (see the BOOK TALK Section at DietHobby.com) and did a lot of experimenting with it in 2011.

I have experimented with what is known as ZERO carb -- which actually turned out to be around 5-10 carbs a day, because I choose not to give up my very small amount of plain, Greek yogurt.

However, during most of my low-carb experimentation, I worked to keep my carbs around 20 or less.

When I'm doing my "normal" - "balanced" food plan, my carbs are usually around 50-80 or less. For me, a normal, really high-carb day would only be about 100 carbs. It just turns out that way, because I don't have a large enough calorie allowance for more.

My own experience .. so far .. because I expect to be doing further future experimentation with low-carb
is that ... either because of the lack of variety in the food, or because carbs cause more cravings (& at this point for me I can't honestly say which)

My appetite tends to be satisfied at around 1100-1200 calories a day, which is just a tiny bit ABOVE my calorie allowance to maintain my current weight, and over a long period of time, would still involve a weight-gain, but I didn't lose any actual fat weight at that calorie level on 20 carbs or on zero carbs.

What happened for my body, was that my weight dropped between 3 to 5 lbs DURING THE TIME I was low-carb, but I feel very certain that this drop was only due to water-weight, because within a week or two of returning to a very-low-calorie, "balanced" diet of around averaging only 800 calories, and my weight quickly adjusted to the previous number.

This happened to me 4 different times, each time after more than a month of successful low-carb eating so I never experienced even a real fat loss of even 1 or 2 lbs,after weeks and weeks of low-carb eating.

That's the personal data I have so far, but it isn't conclusive, and I will be doing more experimentation.

My preference is to receive diet questions in the comment section of DietHobby.com rather than in e-mails, so that the comment and my answer will benefit all of the readers there.

Due to my time limitations, When I spend time writing a long e-mail answer, there's a good chance it will wind up as a future article, anyway.

Like it just did.