Can't We All Just Get Along?

Apparently My Fitness Pal and Auntie Ina are not friends at all.

For those that don't know, My Fitness Pal is a free app for smartphones that will allow you to track your daily calorie intake, keep a food diary, and record your exercise. It is a great tool....if you use it regularly. When I was keeping up with it on a daily basis I was able to lose over 20 pounds.

Then the holidays happened. January 1 is supposed to be the prime time for resolutions, yet I somehow rebelled against that notion. I was just hanging out at a plateau for a while and I was ok with it. Then it started to turn into a slow gain. I figured I would buckle down and knock it off and it would be no big deal. Then....Auntie came around.

As much as I am loving this project of cooking my way through Barefoot Contessa, it is not a friend to my weight loss journey. Some of Auntie's recipes are surprisingly pretty healthy...but many of them are major calorie bombs. So....when I got on the scale this morning after cooking/blogging for a week and a half I had a nasty surprise. Too much cooking, not enough accounting for what I was eating. I really can't blame Auntie Ina...it's all my doing.

In order to keep up the blog AND keep up weight loss I have decided to calculate the calories in each recipe. My Fitness Pal allows you to plug in the ingredients and serving size and it will give you stats. I don't know if they are 100% accurate, but it will at least give a good idea of what we are dealing with here.

Let's give an example....

Last week I baked Auntie's Banana Crunch Muffins. Oh, were those delicious! I plugged them into My Fitness Pal and found that they have 357 calories. Not great, but nowhere near as horrific as the 956 calorie Pecan Bars that I will have to make (and immediately remove from the premises).

Here is Snow White as she contemplates eating that Banana Crunch Muffin. I can just hear her now... "Oh, dear? Should I eat this delicious muffin? I think I shall...but then I will be sure to eat something healthy later. Like a nice, shiny apple...."

Yes, I know. I'm a dork.

So, the moral of the story is that Auntie can wreak havoc on a healthy lifestyle...but only if I let her. I am going to try to make room for both by cooking her recipes but accounting for them on My Fitness Pal, and then maybe we can all get along!