Day 291: 270 lbs

I gained a pound yesterday, and I sense that my weight is creeping up.

But now I know why. Yesterday we had (for the third day in a row) dinner out. This time it was with my parents, and we kept it simple: burgers and the like.

But instead of doing what I have been doing lately, which is simply estimating the total calorie content of the entire dinner, I actually took the time to track down everything I ate in my diet software and log each item individually. This wasn't a perfect process, since I couldn't measure the portion sizes precisely, and there wasn't an exact match for everything, but still....

The result was that it turned out that I consumed about 3,500 calories yesterday, most of it at dinner. I didn't think it was that big of a dinner, either, but 2,000 calories goes down awful fast when you're not watching carefully.

So now I know why I haven't been losing weight the past week or two. I've been getting sloppy (very sloppy) about tracking what I eat in these outside-the-home situations.

From now on, then, no more guessing at meals. I will need to log each item individually and make sure I get the calorie count as close to exact as possible.

(The good news from yesterday is that I got a lot of exercise moving three truckloads of mulch for my parents, which is why they took us out for dinner.)