Started using a cool app on my iPhone today called Touch Goal. It’s highly customizable—you simply add your positive and negative goals to the list and then tap a goals once you’ve completed it. It’s motivating to have a fun positive reinforcement whenever you do something good, and it’s also pretty useful to tell when you get off track. My goals are:

• Sleep 8+ hours?
• Ate less?
• < 1800 calories?
• Worked out?
• Journaled?
• Binged?
• Drank?
• Ate after 7PM?

The last three goals are negatives, i.e., things I’m trying very hard not to do. I don’t punish myself if I do them, but I try extra hard to stay away from them. The top five goals are positives, and a couple of those can be “tapped” more than once. For instance, for every time I make a choice to eat less food (or drink fewer calories) than I used to, I can tap the “Ate Less?” goal. That in itself is extremely motivational and keeps me on track. Today I chose to eat less nine different times. Let’s see if I can list them all…

1. Instead of ordering a latte, I had a coffee.
2. Instead of adding sugar to my coffee, I added sweetener.
3. Instead of having half & half in my coffee, I had non-fat milk.
4. Instead of drinking all my root beer at lunch, I had only a few sips.
5. Instead of binging on chips at dinnertime, I had very few.
6. Instead of ordering a 1400 calorie dinner, I had a 835 calorie dinner.
7. Instead of having a strong drink at dinner, I drank water.
8. Instead of having ice cream for desert at the restaurant, I had none.
9. Instead of having two or three slices of birthday cake tonight, I had one.

The point is about making small choices that don’t feel like huge sacrifices. And not only does making those small choices help shrink my stomach and form more sensible eating habits, but all those small choices have a huge cumulative effect over time.

On another note, I gained about a pound since I started, but I’m not worried. The variation is all over the map at this stage, so I’m sure that I’ll start to see serious results in the next two weeks. Just have to keep my wits about me. That’s my biggest concern, in fact—when you stop eating as much food as you used to, your body stops being as sedated by food, and a wave of emotions sweep over you unexpectedly. If I can keep calm and not lose my temper, then I’ll feel a lot better about everything… and not want to escape by binging on food.

Here are the stats for today:

STATS

Starting Body Fat: 25.7%
Goal Body Fat: <20%
Current Body Fat: 25.9%

Today: +24.8 lbs
Difference from last post: ∆ +1.3

Starting Date: May 12, 2011
Goal Date: October 31, 2011
Total days: 172

Current Date: May 15, 2011
Current Day: 3

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