The story so far: I lost 25 of 35 pounds and then fell off the diet wagon, sabotaging my progress at the final third of the journey. 53F, SW170, CW148, GW135.

I woke up this morning feeling like shit and when I got on the scales, I weighed 148.4 pounds. This represents a gain of three pounds since last week, when I was at my lowest weight. While I am hoping some of it is excess water weight due to carbs and sodium, some of it is most definitely fat and is the reason for this blog. I ate too much cake and pizza and that’s what you get for over-indulging.

Today was Day 1 of the Noom programme. I reasoned that if I am going to have one day when I feel ill and full of remorse, it might as well be Day 1 of my new diet plan because at least then we can tell a story where things improve. It would be worse if it happened on Day 30 or something. So here’s how Day 1 went.

I received a message from my Noom Goal Specialist, a nice looking woman called Phuong, who is in Texas. She says it’s her job to help me achieve my ULTIMATE GOAL (look hot at my wedding next summer) by collaborating weekly to help me set small goals. Today is Tuesday and my task for the next few days is to religiously log everything I eat in the Noom food planner. She says she will check in with me on Friday. I say OK.

The Noom food tracker has a bar code reader and a lot of flexibility so that you can measure and track your food in terms of ounces, cups, grams, calories, servings and many other units. I’m good about tracking my food anyway so it’s not too much hassle to put the information in Noom, even though I like my paper journal that I keep on my desk. Noom’s approach to dieting is to group foods into three colour coded categories based on calorie density. Green foods are things like grapes and salad vegetables. They have a lot of water for their weight, valuable nutrients and not many calories. Yellow foods are things like fats and proteins, I had some meat off a joint of bacon today and also some hummus. These are both yellow foods. Then red foods are things like candy and alcohol and all that stuff.

The Noom plan says that you only want to consume certain amounts of each type of food throughout the day. It took my stats and gave me a daily calorie allowance of 1,200 (which looks as though it may vary day-to-day depending on how much exercise you do each day; it seems to track this via iHealth on my phone). So far so good, this is what I would normally aim for, 1,200 or a bit below. Where I go wrong when I get lazy about dieting is that I don’t bother tracking macros, I stop respecting set meal times and eventually we end up with a situation where I am guiltily eating sugary carbs throughout the day and then feeling hungry because I’ve used up my calorie allowance by 2pm.

Noom is on my case, though. It does not want me eating sweets all day. I’ve been given 1,350 calories to spend (I think because I was exercising outdoors a bit earlier) but I have also received instructions about where to spend those calories. Today I was given 607 calories to spend on yellow foods, of which I spent 500 on meat, mustard and hummus. I was also allowed a generous 337 calories to spend on red food, which bought me one bag of low fat Popchips (bbq flavour, yummy, 23g serving, 96 calories) and four Roses chocolates (219 calories), which I savoured with coffee after dinner.

Other than that, everything I’ve eaten today is salad vegetables, a lot of carrot sticks and a banana. It’s 8pm and I’ve still only consumed 1,049 calories and I haven’t been hungry today. Although of course now I’ve said that I’m wondering if I should eat 150 calories in fruit just because I can.

More tomorrow.