with myfitnesspals like this, who needs enemies?

At the beginning of the week, the hubby and I started using MyFitnessPal.com to track our calories, what we eat, exercise, yadda, yadda, yadda...  It's really a great program.  Especially for the price...ahem...FREE.  All you do is enter in your current weight, your goal weight, let it know how active of a lifestyle you have, and it calculates how many calories you should take in per day, how much you should exercise, etc.

This is exactly what I did and it told me I should eat 1200 calories per day.

My hubby gets to eat almost 1500, and I'm stuck with the bare minimum that a person should ingest per day?  I'm in better shape than he is!  How is this fair?

Okay, no problem, I can do this.

So I've been diligently tracking everything I put in my mouth.  (Minds out of the gutters for a moment, people.)  I create recipes with the proper ingredients, I track every glass of water, I enter every bit of exercise that I do, and all in all, I am usually a little under my 1200 mark per day.  That's a good thing, right?

Apparently not.

After closing out my food diary for the day, it tells me that if every day was like today, in 5 days I should be at (insert awesome poundage here).  Yay!  That's great!  But then in fine print it tells me this:


*Based on your total calories consumed for today, you are eating too few calories. Not only is it difficult to receive adequate nutrition at these calorie levels, but you could also be putting your body into starvation mode. Starvation mode lowers your metabolism and makes weight loss more difficult. We suggest increasing your calorie consumption to 1,200 calories per day minimum.

Hold on.  You were the ones to tell me that 1200 was my target per day.  If I'm only a little under that, and that's going to put me into starvation mode, then why would you give me that number in the first place?  What am I supposed to do - find a little chocolate to give me those extra hundred calories to put me just a little over my goal?  At the end of the day?  I don't think that's such a great idea either.

Oh, the stress!  Eat too much and it's bad.  Eat too little and it's bad (and trust me, I'm nowhere near starving myself).  I swear, I just can't win this one.  MyFitnessPal is always judging me!

I guess I'll just have to start eating a Whatchamacallit in the middle of the day to make sure I don't drop too low.  When I lose my final 14 pounds and people ask me what my secret was, I'll have to reply, "That Whatchamacallit Diet."