Recommended Calorie Counting App!

Baby is sleeping for a few minutes and I thought I'd take a minute to let you all know what's going on with our food around here. 

Random thoughts to start - New favorite "treat": microwaveable sweet potato with 1/2 tbsp of margarine and splenda brown sugar and a sprinkle of cinnamon AND spice chai tea (I'm liking the Twinings brand) with 2 packets of equal.  Yum Yum Yum - and for low calories!

So that brings me to my next point... calories.  Ah, calories.  Now that the baby is here - my weight has been slowly coming back.  Nothing drastic, but there is a trend of about a half pound a week.  I'm still at 175, but I was at 172 (for my 2 year anniversary of my surgery... pictures were taken, just haven't had time to get them loaded and posted).  A few things are probably contributing to the slow creep up in my weight. 1) lack of activity with me being at home.  The baby likes to be rocked... a lot - which means my butt is in the chair.  2) Late night snacking/eating for "2" even though I'm now "1" again and 3) carbs and whites whatever.  I'm not going to go nuts with trying to make drastic changes because I know that doesn't usually stick and we're still adjusting to our new baby driven schedule around here.

What I am doing is using an app on my phone to track my calories/eating throughout the day.  I'm trying to keep my calories between 1600-1800 each day and make sure I get at least 75 grams of protein in each day.  This would be even better if I attempted to cut back on the carbs... but that would most likely be taking on too much at this point.  Before I had my surgery, I used the same app to track my calories/protein/sugar/carbs and I lost 20 pounds in about 3 months.  It's all about tracking with me.  The idea of "intuitive" eating just does not exist in my mind!  My intuition just tells me to eat eat eat (especially now that my appetite/hunger pains are back).  I really enjoy this app and it's free!  Almost like using a coupon ; ) There is an online site you can log into and then the mobile version.  My absolute FAVORITE feature of the app is the bar code scanner.  That's right - you can scan whatever product you're eating and it pulls up the nutrition information - then you just select the serving size you're eating and it's added to your food journal.  It's A-MAZING!  Here is a link to the online site: www.fatsecret.com and if you're using the Android market, you can search for the free mobile app by typing in: "calorie counter" The image above is what the app looks like.  You can also track your exercise and weight on this.  I've been using this to track my weight for the last 2.5 years - it's pretty cool to go back and look at the graph of my loss : )