I never wanted to be That Woman, the one perpetually on a diet, counting calories, constantly reading the backs of boxes or cans or jars for nutritional information. I love food. I love eating it. I love making it.

One thing that I don’t love, however, is exercising. I like walking, and I tolerate Pilates and yoga to a certain degree, but I tend to avoid anything more high-impact. Gyms remind me of high school Phys Ed, even if they smell better than the weight room in my school that reeked of Boy, and not in the good way. (Yes, I did go to a school with a lot more girls than guys, but I blame the weight room smell all on the dudes. Weight Training and Java Programming were the only two classes I took in which girls were in the minority. No, those classes were not my first choice-picks. I’d wanted Aerobics and Women’s Studies.)

You may see a problem here. I like eating. I don’t like exercising. And while “Asian girl” probably conjures up images of skinny lil’ things (I know a few, too), that’s not me. My family tends to be chubby.

I lucked out in college, and didn’t gain the Freshman 15. But through the course of grad school, I gained weight. Several culprits:

  • pizza and beer after classes got out at 9pm
  • lattes and big cookies while writing at the coffee shop
  • eating my feelings (said manuscript, general feelings of writerly inadequacy and “What am I doing with my life?”).

Coming back to Boston and not having the transition be as speedy as I’d imagined was also hard. Being unemployed often being bored. Yes, there was a beautiful city with sights to see at my very fingertips, but I was trying to save money. Although being poor also limited how much I ate out, I was never starving or limiting how much I ate. I was pretty depressed and inactive. One doesn’t burn many calories constantly scouring the Internet for job postings.

In October, I moved in with a different friend, with whom I’m still staying. B and I are both vegetarians, and since we’ve known each other a long time, I have a good sense of what foods he likes and dislikes. He also won’t take my money for letting me stay with him, but conceded to at least eating my cooking. The unemployed, after all, have more free time than full-time engineers. It’s not a living situation where a fresh, hot dinner is waiting for him whenever he gets home, but there are always at least leftovers in the fridge that he can have, if he chooses. And it’s just too bad that he doesn’t like kale, because I’m in a kale phase now. He’ll still eat spicy kale lasagna, despite his grumbling.

B had started to use his app on his iPhone called Lose It!, to record his daily exercise and caloric intake earlier this fall. The app also works on the iPod Touch, so I downloaded it out of curiosity. The app has a database of foods and their calories, but you can enter “new” foods and their caloric values manually as well.

I consider myself a healthy eater. Yes, I really should incorporate more vegetables into my diet, especially of the dark leafy green variety, but shouldn’t everyone? I have fruit everyday. Water’s my main beverage of choice. Most of my protein is plant-based.

Having an app take on the work of recording what and how much I ate in a day = HOLY CRAP.  I don’t even do the post-9 p.m. beer and pizza, or the latte and giant cookie anymore.

One of my issues was portion control. I often scoffed at servings listed on food packaging. Just 2 cookies? I usually ended up eating 2 or 3 servings. When I was growing up, there was always more than enough food, and the encouragement was always to “Eat more” and clean my rice bowl. Even today I feel weird not cleaning my plate. This is especially bad at restaurants, where I don’t control how much is put on my plate in the first place–I could be eating two or three meals in one sitting.

Having a specific budget helped me make better food choices. Sure, I could–and did–eat four fun-size Milky Ways for breakfast the day after Halloween (along with a banana), but I knew that would affect the rest of the day, and had to make choices accordingly. At least I only ate four.

With Lose It!, you can input your ideal weight, and determine the rate at which you’d like to lose weight (1/2 pound a week, a pound a week, 2 pounds a week), and the app will calculate how many calories you should be consuming daily. As you lose weight and log in your new weight, the app modifies your daily caloric budget.

As for exercise, it counts as negative calories in the app. Want to eat more? Then you have to move more. A lot of exercises and their estimated caloric burn are programmed into the app, including broomball, sexual activity (three levels of it, too–light, moderate, and vigorous–ick), luge, running, walking and gardening.

It helped me that in early October, as I realized that my time in Boston could be coming to an end, I realized I didn’t want to spend what could possibly be my last month in the city cooped up indoors, feeling sorry for myself. I was going to go out and do things, gosh darn it. It also helped that the temperatures were finally cooling off, so that I could no longer make excuses about sweating as soon as the front door shut behind me.

When I started the Lose It! program, my BMI was 25, which is categorized as overweight. I’ve lost a few pounds since then, and have brought my BMI back down to the normal range, but I’m trying to get to the median of that range, around 22. My rationale is that it’s easier for me to lose weight than it will be in the future, especially if I have children someday and pack on baby weight. I’m aware that BMI measurements aren’t always accurate indicators of health, but they’re relatively easy guidelines.

The upcoming holiday season might prove a big challenge to calorie counting. I’m sure I fell off the wagon during my weekend trip to Davis, I ate out every meal, but when I weighed myself post-trip, there wasn’t that noticeable of a change. I made out okay with regards to Halloween. Now that I’m starting a new job, it might be more difficult to eat right and find time to exercise. It could also be good, in that I have to make even smarter food choices (because while it’s okay to eat four Milky Ways for breakfast when you’ve got no place to be, it’s not okay when you are at work and have to use your brain and interact with people). And there’s a gym chain that gives employees from my company a pretty substantial discount. I might try to get over my phobia of gyms.

I’m hoping that I still won’t be That Woman. Counting can be fun, right?

(You might be more familiar with the “censored” version of this song. Oh, Internet.)

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