Frowny Faces Are Not Always Bad

Amy and I are both counting calories, which I know in some people's book is a curse, rather than helpful.  But for me it's been absolutely necessary to really know what's going into my mouth.  That way I make better decisions about whether a treat is really worth the calories it costs, I guess.  This is vital for someone like me who has found that making any kind of food off-limits (particularly if it's one of my favorites) backfires because I just can't stick with it very long.

For my calorie counting I use myfooddiary.com.  It's a subscription food diary (so you have to pay a monthly fee to use it) but I've decided the $9/month is worth it.  I like the format, I like how I can enter my own recipes, and the number of foods that are already in the database is quite large.  One of the little features that myfooddiary uses to motivate is when you finish your diary for the day it gives you a bunch of green smiley faces for meeting certain positive dieting goals or red frowny faces for less than stellar choices.  Only once in the several years I've been keeping a food diary have I ever managed to get all smiley faces at the end of a day.  Usually I get a frowny for my sodium intake and my saturated fats being too high.  (Can't be perfect, I guess.)

Yesterday was a new record for me.  Not a good one though.  I had only one smiley face and SIX frownies.  At least I didn't drink any alcohol and got one positive!  Really, though, I'm quite proud of myself.  I usually don't track my eating on Sunday at all (it's my "free" day, if you will) because I know it's going to be my worst day of the week.  But yesterday, despite the fact that I knew we would be celebrating my sister's birthday and there would be no exercise and a host of other negative things, I still kept my food diary.  I even entered every little thing I ate, down to the snitch of chocolate chips I grabbed at bedtime (I need to get rid of that habit!).  The best part was that even though my eating wasn't spectacularly good yesterday, keeping the food diary accurately kept me within the calorie limit for me to at least maintain my weight.  Absolutely necessary if I'm going to have a weekly cheat day!