I’ve been watching with amusement the recent recent fuss about line diets hitting the blog world, for I’ve been doing this for a number of years, and I had no idea it was actually called something.
Back in 2005 I started tracking my daily weight in an Excel spreadsheet. The system was simple: weigh myself, go into work, jot it down. I did it at work because I kept a second tab in the spreadsheet and tracked my caloric and fat intake each day. I set consumption goals, and after lunch I’d know how much room I had left for dinner and dessert.
I’ve never blogged about it because, frankly, I found it to be a rather poor diet tool. It was a terrific learning exercise–I’m far more cognizant now about just how fattening food is.
But the spreadsheet, while a fun game, was not much of a motivator. Yes, I wanted to make a pretty declining trendline, and to punch the lower limits of the chart. But I didn’t find that any more satisfying than simply stepping on the scale in the morning and seeing how I did. Data points, to me, were decidedly unsexy.
I kept returning to the spreadsheet on and off into 2008, mostly for the daily food lists, which were better at keeping me honest (and just a label-reading version of Weight Watchers’ point system). Then I gave up, got really fat, and have lost weight in the past year simply by convincing myself to snack less. Spreadsheets are great, but they don’t provide willpower. And on a successful diet, a spreadsheet is redundant–the evidence is in the mirror.