The InnerPlate diet is focused on portion awareness. It’s a mindful approach to the right portions for losing weight, and the right portions for staying at a healthy weight. It does so by creating a feedback loop- what you eat is tracked, and it shows how you are doing. You are then motivated at multiple levels to adjust your path forward.
Fundamental to this is finding your correct stable calorie level. Typically, this is based on age, height, weight, gender and activity level. However, it’s still a guess, and InnerPlate.com’s feedback capabilities are simply amazing at helping you find you true number.
The goals of the first two weeks of the InnerPlate diet are pretty simple:
1. track everything
2. build your personal database, creating an environment where you can track everything in 2-4 minutes per day (making 1 idiotically easy)
3. learn about your eating patterns and try to improve them based on feedback.
After the first two weeks, goal 3 is the dominant goal, and you are encouraged to use estimation and rules of thumb to make tracking easy.
In this blog post, I’m going to share the first two weeks of my diet. With some online calculation help (Mayo Clinic, as linked to in http://innerplate.com), I started tracking based on a 2200 calorie stable level. To lose weight, I’d have to average a calorie level lower then that, creating a deficit and losing pounds at a rate of 3500 calories per pound (all standard predictive values).
With the InnerPlate diet, it’s one commitment is to track. And in that spirit, most of the first two weeks I focused on tracking every day and refining my food database on InnerPlate.com as I went along. I wasn’t overly concerned about losing weight. By day nine, I was only adding 1 new food to by database every two days, and I was tracking in 3-4 minutes per day. So far so good! However, I was missing my calorie targets- by a lot.
Here are my results:
Results Against Estimated 2200 Calorie Stable Consumption
The RESULTS listing is a stream of your calories over the length of your tracking commitment. It’s divided into weeks and days, giving calorie feedback at the daily, weekly and commitment level. Red means you are way off target, orange significantly off target, and green means you are largely on target. Each Week, Day, or Meal can be expanded or folded by simpling clicking on it. This screenshot shows all of the last day, and the meal level view of the prior day (with a full view of breakfast).
With a goal to lose 1.5 pounds a week, my daily calorie goal was 1450 calories- a deficit of 750 calories.
Week 1 average 2539 calories per day. More them 1000 more! And 339 calories above my daily stable. 3 * 339 = 1000 extra calories- 1/3 of a pound predicted weight gain based on 3500 calories per pound. I wasn’t trying too hard here- I was mostly focused on learning and finding new ways to eat.
Also, the InnerPlate diet is feedback based. I didn’t try to count calories while eating. Rather, I simply tracked after the fact.
Week 2, I improved by 249 calories per day! Of course, with the InnerPlate diet the complete history of your commitment results are always onscreen for you to see, offering subtle motivation on a daily basis. I really wanted to move from red (way off goal) to orange or green (yeah! close to on goal!).
Strange thing though- the prediction was I was gaining weight and I lost 2 pounds! Now any weight loss measure is plus or minus 1 or 2 pounds, and you need more then 9 days for a certain number, but this was likely real loss of at least 1 pound. Expecially since I hadn’t changed my diet in a way likely to change water retention (with the Atkin’s diet the first 5 pounds lost is famously water loss).
Lets Now Look at the Goal Summary
It’s predicting I’ve gained 0.5 pounds so far, against my goal of losing 1.9 pounds, and my actual loss of 2 pounds.
Furthermore, it’s predicting that if I continue at my 2363 calorie average, I’ll gain 0.7 pounds rather then lose the 3 I targeted.
Somethings not right. My stable calories must be higher. Maybe I’m more active then I though. So, looking at my loss so far, I changed my stable rate to 2600 and revisited my results and my goal summary.
Results Against Estimated 2200 Calorie Stable Consumption
Look at that! My daily goal calories are 1850 now instead of 1450 to lose my targeted 1.5 pounds per week, and I’m getting better feedback. My first week is orange rather then red, and my second week is green, though right on the border of orange.
Lets Now Look at the Goal Summary
How about that! It now predicts a loss of 0.6 pounds rather then a gain of 0.5 pounds. My actual loss of 2 pounds is bit more reasonable. Remember, it’s only 9 days so far, and any weight loss measure is +/- one or two pounds.
My daily average overall is still way above my target, but that’s okay. I’m learning about my body and the impact of what I eat. I’m getting better at planning meals to avoid hunger, I’ve narrowed down my stable daily calories, and I’ve updated my personal food database so I can track in 3-4 minutes a day. Those are pretty awesome results for 9 days!
And look at the “The Rest of the Way” section. I can see that if I achieve the 1850 calories the remaining 5 days, I’ll lose an extra pound over keeping my current path. Extra motivation! Note that this end weight is projected. When I complete this 2 week tracking commitment, I’ll update my final weight and use that information in planning the next commitments. After a while, these numbers will start to align due to a more accurate stable calorie number and a longer period of time to average weight loss over.
In 5 more days, the initial 2 week commitment will come to a close, and I’ll be moving on to the next commitment.
If you haven’t tried InnerPlate.com yet, give it a try.
Talk to you then!
