I am a new member, but I have been on the lc bandwagon for a while. I may have mentioned I fell off for a bit, but Im back now.

I was reading in other threads about putting your daily food intake into fitday and checking your ratio. Here comes the shocker! How do you train yourself to NOT look at the calories and have a heart attack!

I know the carbs were in line (37 without deducting the fiber /20 dead on after reducing the fiber counts). But the calories were over 2000! YIKES!

someone give me a mental trick!

There's nothing wrong with looking at the calories. Some ppl have to count, and some don't. You have to "do you." 2000 cals isn't super-high, and it may be appropriate if you are a woman of substantial size - weight-wise or build-wise.

Are you sure your carbs were in line? 37? I was eating that many and NOT losing an ounce.

37 before making the fiber deductions. I took the default from fitday, and it doesn't make the fiber subtractions. Even the atkins shakes I input show 5 carbs, when the net carbs are 1. So by that reasoning, I was at 20net carbs.

2000 is a normal, acceptable, fat-burning calorie intake for a woman weighing 130#.

But....

Some of your protein calories are used for structural repairs (blood cells, muscle) and not burned for fuel.

Some of your fat calories are excreted rather than burned.

If seeing the calorie numbers is freaking you out, stop doing the FitDay. :-) It's *far* from necessary on Atkins! If you like keeping a record of what you ate, journal it here.

Dr. Atkins said that there is NO NEED to count calories. Exceptions are rare. (And no one knows if they are an exception or not until they've tried Atkins as written, with plenty of fat, plenty of meat, and 20 gm carb.)

I just don't use fitday unless I need to create a custom food to see what the counts are in different measurements.

I keep a written food diary that I ONLY list carb counts for each thing I eat per day, and total it at the end with how much water I drank and any exercise I got. That way, I only see and worry about carbs.
You could try that! Get a nice little notebook and write it down

Kim,

I'm with you. A loosely written diary is really all that is necessary to pick up on trends that may be stalling us or for that matter what is working. Of course what is working we'd like to continue to reproduce for ongoing weight loss.

I am to the point with my Groves plan that I can tune my appetite as easily as if I were taking diet pills. I don't weigh myself, I don't weigh my food and I don't count anything. You have to learn your body, and then learn how it cues you as to it's needs.

It's not natural to obsess over numbers and probably very few people will continue to do that long term. You have to learn and I mean really learn how to do it without the numbers. Once you do that there will never be reason to diet again, because you didn't lose your weight being on a diet in the first place. Good luck with that!

I do use Fitday, but I use the PC version and you select the values you want to see. I shut off calories, but their format for totals gives calories. A normal day for me is between 1700-2000 calories. And there are days I go over 2000....I think my limit lately is around 2200.

I'm 5'8" and medium frame and currently just under 180. But I'm also fairly sedentary. I walk my dogs as needed, and do some weight lifting as I'm able to, but I also sit at a computer at least 10-12 hours a day. I have found that if my calories drop below 1600 or so my loss slows. I think it's because both fat and protein are lower on those days, but carb is about the same (30-40g total/day usually).