I want to share with you my beeminder success story. I joined beeminder, like many people, because I wanted to lose a bit of weight. I eat generally healthily and know which types of food to eat/avoid, but quantity is such a slippery slope for me and I often end up eating more than I need to (especially late at night). The problem with all my previous attempts was that I hate 'diets'. At best, they're short-term solutions (many people regain the weight after a couple of years), and at worst, they are just exchanging one set of unhealthy eating habits to another. Since I didn't have foods I could simply cut out of my diet, I usually made up my own rules about how much to eat, or when, and I even tried counting calories. Nothing really worked.
I figured the only problem was a lack of motivation, so when I learnt about Beeminder, I joined, started a weight goal, entered my current and goal weights, and then waited for the magic to happen. It seemed like the threat of losing money would be enough to keep my food-akrasia at bay.
Of course, the only thing that happened was that I derailed. Twice. I kept saying to myself that I'd change my eating habits before it was too late, but it never happened. At one point, someone from beeminder mentioned that a lot of people have more success beeminding things they have direct, day-to-day control over, like eating or exercise. That was when I started tracking bites.
I used got a tapcounter app for my iPhone, and created a do-less goal, tracking *bites* of food. So I eat as much as I want, tapping my phone for every fork/mouthful, and stop when I've hit 100 bites. It has been really amazing and it surprised me how easy and effective it's been. I think it's because even though each individual bite isn't very meaningful (each bite of food has a different number of Calories), the average number of bites of food I eat a day paints a picture of my eating habits. Sometimes that means large meals and no snacks, sometimes I snack a lot and only have one or two meals. Because of my yellow brick road, I know I how often I'm able to splurge and stay on track, and I can see how constantly eating large meals or too many snacks makes me go over and risk derailing. Knowing I only have a certain number of bites in a day helps me eat better too! When I see I'm starting to run out, I go for high-protein and high-fibre foods because I don't want to be hungry when I've run out of bites. I love it because I feel totally able to keep track of my eating, without all the annoying number-crunching of Calories or fat/carbs/protein.
Has anyone else tried unconventional methods of weight-loss beeminding? I'm interested in how other strategies have worked.
-- Yonah
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http://dreev.es -- search://"Daniel Reeves"
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com
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We're moving Akratics Anonymous to http://forum.beeminder.com--
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