I would never...

I have something to admit that I never thought I would admit!

Hubby & I have been counting calories! About 4.5 months ago Hubby talked me into giving calorie counting a try after our upteenth try at South Beach fell to the wayside. I had used all the excuses before: Calories were made up by the dieting industry, I didn't want to turn all my food into a set of numbers, I didn't want to become one of those people who takes forever to order when going out because I have to calculate everything first...
Once I relented and said we could give it a shot, I told Hubby I didn't want anyone to know! I didn't want to fail yet again! But here we are 4 1/2 months later, & other than the holidays ( because calories don't count on holidays!) we have stuck to it!
I have learned alot!
Any diet can work if you stick to it. The important thing is finding a diet that fits with your lifestyle. I still feel like South Beach is a great diet, it wants you to cut unhealthy foods out of your life. Something I learned about me is, if I can't have something, then when I inevitably eat it, I feel like a failure & eat ten more things I "can't have".
With calorie counting, nothing is off limits (except a large shake from Sonic, those are more than my entire day's calorie allotment!) everything just has to fit into your day's calories. For example, the day after we started we already had date night planned for Texas Roadhouse. I love the margaritas at Texas roadhouse! So I looked up how many calories my margarita would be, & planned the rest of my day's calories so I would have enough leftover :) And that brings me to my fear of taking forever to order; we have the internet in our pockets now! I just look up where we are going on the way (Hubby usually drives, please don't do this if you are driving! Wait til you are parked) & figure out what I want & what fits into the calories I still have.
As we have gone, we have learned what the calories are for certain things we eat often. We have also said more than once, "so this is why we are fat!" when finding out the calories for things we used to eat too often, like the aforementioned large Sonic Shake!
So for the nuts & bolts of how we are doing it, we are using the My Fitness Pal app to keep track of our calories. They already have a lot of foods saved in their system, but if it isn't there, you can add it. You can also create recipes, & the app will tell you how many calories a serving is based on the ingredients. We also keep track of our exercise in the app, & it adds those calories back into our day's allotment. My exercise consists of walking Ghost a couple times a week. When it's warmer, Hubby plays tennis, & it is crazy how many calories that burns! We also use the Samsung app S Health the keep track of our steps when we are going somewhere like Six Flags or the State Fair where we will be walking a lot. It tells us how many calories are burned from how many steps we walked, & we just enter that into our calorie counter. We have found that we walk so much at these types of events, that even after all the fried food we ate at the fair, we came home with a surplus of calories! So if you want to eat everything in sight, just walk 8-10 hours a day ;)
So all that to say, "Hello, my name is Krystle, & I am a calorie counter." As of New Years Eve, I have lost 13.8 lbs, Hubby has lost 22 lbs. This is the longest we have ever stuck to a diet! We have a long way to go, but we are actually getting there instead of just talking about getting there!