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Hacking Your Plan

Man, this is tough. It's funny how quickly your body readjusts to higher calorie consumption and how it freaks out when you try to run deficits again. My hunger pangs at night are fierce just like old times. They kind of masked themselves for a while behind high step counts and a calorie logging vacation as my weight started drifting away, but try and get back in the swing of things and your body gets PISSED.

My calorie intake was elevated over the weekend - about 2900 per day. However, I racked up over 70,000 steps from Friday-Sunday, that includes a 5 mile run, and STILL couldn't budge the needle.

So, I'm going to have to make some adjustments. I haven't been getting much help from the weather this week with cold temps and icy and rainy weather keeping me off my bike and limiting my dog walking. I'm going to have to start getting creative.

One really annoying thing is that Google Fit seemed to remove the nutrition card from their dashboard for some reason. It used to pull the data in from MyFitnessPal, and after fiddling around with it for a while, I saw on reddit that said they yanked the feature. I hadn't noticed it until now since I fell off the calorie tracking wagon for so long, but now that I'm in crisis mode, I'm missing it like a security blanket. It almost has me thinking about pulling one of my Fitbits out of the drawer again, which sucks because I've really gotten used to not charging a separate device and wearing my old watch. I can't be the only non-Fitbit person who just wants a single damn dashboard, can I?!

Anyway, Android phones let you arrange widgets on your main home screen, and both Google Fit and MyFitnessPal apps come included with them. The Google Fit one is pretty good, telling you exactly what you need, but the MyFitnessPal one utterly sucks, as it'll only tell you Calories Remaining based on your calorie budget (mine is set for 2500), not your total calorie consumption on the day. This is incredibly stupid as your calorie budget should be elastic based on your activity levels. I shouldn't have to mentally subtract from a static calorie goal just to see my calorie in/calorie out stats.

Oh, sorry, technically MyFitnessPal does factor in exercise to your Calories Remaining bottom line, but as of 11:45AM today it attributed 19 whole calories for exercise thus far. I think I probably burned off 19 calories by about 12:15AM, so yeah, looks like the sync with Google Fit is going swimmingly. I've already disabled the sync feature, so it appears that I'll be keeping my calories in and calories out in two separate silos. Fine. There may be another way to skin this cat, but practically doing anything other than the basics in MyFitnessPal requires a subscription - not a one time premium app fee - a damn subscription. I might as well shut down this blog if I'm going to pay for something so stupid.


Anyway, while writing this blog post, I just figured out how to hack it. What if I zeroed out my 2500 daily calorie goal so that Calories Remaining would be the negative of my total calorie intake on the day. Well, the MyFitnessPal app would not accept a value less than 100 calories as my daily goal, but guess what? Their website doesn't have that restriction, and as soon as I updated it there, it updated in the app. Cool.


Their widget is ridiculously large and not re-sizable (I trimmed out the padding in the top pic), so you'll want to use another Android launcher like Nova launcher to re-size it to normal size. Now I can easily see that I've burned 916 calories and consumed 611 (well, technically 630 after adding back in the 19 calories they credited me for rolling over in bed) in a small corner of my main dashboard. Booyah!

As far as calorie consumption management, I'm still trying to figure out what I can do to mitigate the late night pangs. I'm still eating tons of fruit, but it's not doing the job. Maybe I'll just try running larger calorie deficits going home from work so that I have more headroom to play with later.

Also, SEAL training resumes tonight. I'm writing it down, so this way I have to do it.

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