Hiya, I’ve been doing IF since October and have lost 20 lbs (F, 5’11’’, SW 204 CW 184 GW 165 - woohoo!). I usually have been doing 16:8 but have recently been doing 17:7 and 18:6.
I’ve been tracking my weight loss and planning out my meals on Noom, but I’m starting to not like the app. I feel like I’m focusing more on my caloric intake now and I don’t think that’s healthy for me! (Also it’s sooo expensive) I was wondering what the people out there use? I like being able to see my weight loss/gain trend and I found planning out my meals very helpful. I don’t want to use weight watchers because I think I’ll experience the same issues that I had with Noom haha. Thanks for the advice!
Myfitnesspal has stats on macros and nutrition. I use it to keep track of things like iron and fibre. If you get the premium version you can change the view so it’s not calories, but your macros goals instead.
I was surprised it turned out after not tracking for a month, that I was high on fat and low on carbs. It helps me keep proportions balanced for my needs and understand what I need to find out about nutrition. Ultimately I rediscovered foods like oats, cabbage, cottage cheese, eggs and radish as cheap and effective weight loss foods for me. Stuff my grandparents would make and eat if they were my age today. Also found superfoods like spirulina to be beneficial too.
I use a run of the mill spreadsheet to track weight, blood sugars, everything I ate, exercise, notable events, etc. Been doing that about 15 years now. Frankly the caloric estimates are just that, estimates, but I find the act of tracking to be the most helpful thing of all (because I think about it). Since I sit at a computer all the time, I don’t find it a burden to pop open a new tab and do a quick search for say pea soup calories per cup. Plus if I’ve eaten something in the past I just search for it in the spreadsheet to find the caloric estimate. I also do a separate tab per year to keep the length manageable.
I used to use MyFitnessPal but they had a couple of hard stupidities in their UI, plus looking up say “Chili” yielded 5,000 different results, with wildly varying calories per cup. I found MFP overall just more of a pain than a spreadsheet. That said, a lot of people swear by that kind of app. Also it’s been at least 10 years since I used it.