My new little companion

I just started a five-week human nutrition class (for credits towards my degree). It was a coincidence that this class started at the beginning of my weight loss adventure. Part of textbook package we received was a computer program called Diet Analysis Plus. This software is ridiculously addictive!!

We are required to track everything we eat and drink for three days (I did Thursday, Friday, and Saturday). I had a lot of fun entering my items into the system. It would search and then pop up suggestions of what it thought you meant. I had to create a few items because they weren't in the database, but it was no big deal. Very user friendly. I learned so much about the food I normally eat. NO WONDER I'M FAT!! I have stopped two very regular food habits.

1. My two-cup in the a.m. coffees. With cream and sugar it packed in nearly 400 calories right out of the gate! Not good. Not good at all.

2. My "Breakfast Thursday" tradition with the girls at work. We always have a Sausage McMuffin from McDonald's. I might as well just get an English muffin and smear a half-pound of animal fat on it.

This system prints out a 20+ page report about everything you ate over a three day period (calories, fat, vitamins, minerals, ect).

I actually plugged in the foods I ate yesterday before deciding if we could go to Dairy Queen last night. I had 1,000 calories to spare. I went online and printed off the nutritional data from the DQ website. The most "diet friendly" Blizzard is the small Banana Split Blizzard with 440 calories. So that's what I had. It was really yummy! Even with the ice cream, I had about 500 calories "left over" at the end of the day. Pretty cool.

One thing I do know- I'm going to keep using this software. I think it really helped me understand a few things about what I am used to eating. I totally recommend it to anyone, even people not on a diet.

Check it out at Amazon.com