Using Living Cookbook & the MyPoints Spreadsheet How the Honey Do List Guy is Losing Weight

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1 Using Living Cookbook & the MyPoints Spreadsheet How the Honey Do List Guy is Losing Weight Background We both knew we were too heavy, but we d accepted the current wisdom, Accept yourself as you are you probably can t change it. Most people who go on diets gain back more than they lose. I d taken nutrition in college bless you, Marge Divine, I learned a lot in your class, and refer to your teaching at least once a week ( according to the sainted Marge Divine,. ) I knew that the real basis for weight control is calorie control. However, there s an element of willpower that is required for that to work, and HDLG and I had never managed it. Over the course of the past twelve years, each of us gained 70 pounds. We bought fat clothes every year or so, and tried exercise, but while we felt better, we still continued to gain weight. We were eating what we thought were healthy foods - but we were eating way too much of them! Two things happened in the past year that got our attention. First, a friend of ours startled my husband with this comment: You know, you look a lot like me. I ve had two heart attacks, and I don t ever want another one. If you don t do something about your eating, that s what s going to happen to you too. Trust me, you don t want to go there. Second, another friend lost 70 pounds over the course of seven months and kept it off for a year. At first we were worried that he was seriously ill; when we finally got up the courage to ask what had happened, he told us he was doing a Weight Watchers program. The key thing was he didn t have to change his lifestyle (he didn t have to run 6 miles a day, like another young friend) he simply changed his eating. Two of the biggest disincentives to following a WW program are that you have to attend meetings, and the only way to be sure you re getting the right number of points is to buy their food. We didn t have time for any more meetings, and we wanted to keep eating the things we liked to eat. Fortunately, we found tools that let us overcome both of these obstacles, though it took us a while to accumulate all the tools we needed. We ve been doing this only three weeks, but it s working the HDLG has lost 12 pounds! so we decided to blog about it, in case it can help anyone else in the same situation we were in. Count What You Eat and Track It Cookbook Software and a Spreadsheet I think what makes the Points system work, where calorie counting didn t, is the apparent neutrality of points. The points calculation formula is arcane enough that it becomes almost an abstract concept you get a daily points allowance or points budget, and stick to it. Calculating the points of everything you eat was the most challenging component of the program. We knew we didn t want to buy packaged, point-calculated food, but figuring out the points in the food we prepare could take all day! Finding Living Cookbook solved that problem. Try it for 30 days for free; it costs $35 to buy. (No co-marketing here I just LIKE this software, and have bought two copies so far; if my older daughter decides she wants a copy, I ll buy her one.) Page 1

2 Another challenge is the need to keep track if everything you eat. We keep a food journal in spreadsheet form, which lets you monitor progress over a week and beyond. The spreadsheet will take care of calculating points over the course of a day and week for you, as well as graphing your weight loss. Instructions on how it works and how to use it are here. The first thing you have to know is what the point values are for the things you eat. Because Living Cookbook isn t intuitively obvious, I m going to include some screenshots and how-to text on how to get your recipes into it. Living Cookbook Calculating Your Points Living Cookbook is capable of lots more than I m going to describe here; the thing that it does that nothing else did, when I bought it, is calculate Points. They include the traditional Points formula, and let the user determine whether (s)he wants to use the same calculation, or whether to vary it. We chose to use the traditional formula. We weren t planning to change what we ate radically therefore, we needed to know the point values for the foods we prepare. If you enter your recipes in Living Cookbook, it can calculate the points for you. This is how you configure Living Cookbook to calculate points: Pull down from the Tools menu item to Options This is the Application Options window. Scroll down to Nutrition, expand it, and you will see MyPoints. Click on that, and the MyPoints formula is displayed. They nicely give you the traditional formula, and explain that you can use it straight, or adjust it anyhow you want. We decided to use the traditional formula without modification, so we entered the numbers they showed below the a, b, and c boxes, and clicked OK. Page 2

3 This is what a recipe looks like in LC I entered the information myself; notice that above the recipe, toward the left, there s a New Recipe button that s what I had to click to enter the recipe shown in the screenshot below. Note, also, the MyPoints figure at the end of the Nutrition information. That s the reason we re doing all this! The appearance of the recipe is something you configure in LC. I didn t like the way it looked out of the box so I tinkered with fonts and colors. The process of entering recipes and ingredients in Living Cookbook is shown on the following page. Page 3

4 Entering your own recipes in Living Cookbook Click the New Recipe button (see the arrow on the previous screenshot). To create a recipe in LC, you must give it a name, and it has to be stored in a cookbook (a folder that you create within LC). To get the points calculated correctly, the ingredients have to be in the database. No surprise, if the ingredient doesn t already exist in LC s database, you can add it there s a New Ingredient button similar to the New Recipe button that lets you do that. So in the next screenshot, I m creating a new recipe for Thai Chicken; I should have entered a Servings value here; otherwise it counts points for the entire recipe. Next, click the Ingredients tab. Enter the ingredients in the cells as shown here. Here s the first ingredient in Thai Chicken the blue box to the right of chicken thighs means LC doesn t immediately know what chicken thighs means. So I click on that blue box. Page 4

5 I get the ingredient link box and by the time it displays, LC has figured out what chicken thighs are: The next screenshot shows what a known ingredient looks like when it s correctly linked. The only other ingredient is the marinade; I enter the name thai sauce and it gives me the wrong ingredient. That s because I ve called the recipe April s Thai Marinade not Thai sauce Page 5

6 So I have to go into the ingredient search and fix that notice that I link to a recipe here, not an ingredient: I enter the procedures on the Procedures Tab (see the New Recipe screenshots for the location of that tab it s between Ingredients and Nutrition ) and when I ve finished that I click OK. I went back to the Recipe tab and set the Servings to 4. This is the completed recipe notice the final entry in the Nutrition Facts MyPoints! Page 6

7 Adding a New Ingredient to the LC Database When an ingredient isn t listed in the LC ingredient database, it s easy to enter it yourself. Click the New Ingredient button, and this dialog box pops up. Click Next (at the bottom) and follow the prompts, entering the serving size and nutrient amounts that you ve found on the label, or on the mfr s web site. Note that, like Recipes, Ingredients have to be assigned to folders. Here s the completed Ingredient; I can now use this in any recipe. That s basically all you need to get you started. Remember to save your LC data periodically; it should prompt you to make a backup, and when it does, let it do that. Using the MyPoints Spreadsheet to track your points and weight loss Now you have to figure out how many points you are allowed and track how many you actually use each day. The points calculators are out there on the web. There are also quite a few points tracking spreadsheets out there. The one I liked best was created by Ray Ruediger and published in He says it s fine to share it, as long as it s offered for free. I liked almost everything about Ray s spreadsheet except the fact that he co-opted Ctrl-D and Ctrl-R. So I rebuilt Ray s spreadsheet, and added to it the things that were missing weigh-in data and graphing the weight loss over multiple weeks, the Points calculator, and a Data sheet that has lots of foods with their point values. Page 7

8 This is what the MyPoints Calculator spreadsheet looks like when you open it. Note the tabs along the bottom. The first one (at the far left) is Summary. Then there are daily tabs, Sun-Fri; a Data tab, Weight Tracking (the weigh-in page) and Weight Tracking Graph; Exercise Bonus Points, and finally Points Calculator. The last one, which is rust colored, is the place to start. The first thing you need to do is figure out how many points you re allowed. I ve tried to make this really simple. There are dropdown lists that you use to describe yourself, and when you ve finished, your total daily points budget is displayed. This screenshot shows the form with no data. Ignore the fact that it starts with a value of 2 - trust me, when you ve made your selections, it will add it up correctly. Page 8

9 Select the gender description that fits best (if you re a nursing mother, you get extra points; otherwise, it s just male or female) Select the age range that applies to you/ I ve skipped the weight box just enter that figure; then move on to the height range. You re either 5 1 or under, 5 1 to 5 10, or over (The bizarre labels are courtesy of Excel, which insists that the lookup tables be alphabetized. Sheesh!) Page 9

10 Finally, select your activity level this is what you spend the majority of your day doing. Here s the Points Calculator filled out for a Nursing Mom, 34 years old, weighing 180 at the start of the program, 5 6 tall, and who chases her kids around a lot. The Points Calculator gives her 36 points per day. That number goes into the Daily Budget on the Summary Page. Page 10

11 Here s the Summary Page, with Busy Mom s name in the Name field, the 36 points in the Daily Points Allowance field, her starting and target weights filled in the appropriate cells, and the dates she will weigh in in the Date column. I apologize, you will have to create the date list (Fill Series Date 7) in another spreadsheet and copy the values into this column. I ll figure this out eventually, but I really want to get this posted, so I m publishing it as is for now. When you enter the Daily Points Allowance in the Summary Sheet, it is picked up in the Daily tabs (look at cell D1) Page 11

12 You can earn Bonus Points by exercising use the ExerciseBonusPoints tab to calculate those points. Enter the calculated value into the corresponding daily tab, in cell C1, the white cell above Bonus Points (see previous screenshot). I haven t shown the Weigh-in (Weight Tracking) tab or the Weight Tracking Graph tabs it s pretty self-explanatory: you enter the start date, and it should fill down a year s worth of dates from there. Enter the names of the people whose weight you re tracking. The spreadsheet should pick up data from two columns of participants, and graph them in the Graph tab. (continued on the next page) Page 12

13 If you don t want to plug ingredients and recipes into Living Cookbook, you may find the food you re eating in the Data tab or in one of the many online sources. This is the Data tab you may find foods that you eat in this table. Someone has kindly calculated the points for you. I picked this up on the web I ve lost the author s name and web page. The hidden columns are empty; they let you store the serving size, calories, fat grams, and fiber grams information, if you want to track those and use them for manual calculations (next screenshot). Page 13

14 If you don t want to use Living Cookbook to calculate your points per meal, you can calculate your points manually by (this is the manual part) entering the serving size, calories, fat and fiber grams into the daily tabs, in columns D, E, F and G. The points will be calculated in column C. (In my opinion, this is a real pain, and one of the major reasons we didn t try this program before now.) Saving your spreadsheet with a new name each week will let you keep track of your weigh-in data over time. To save your spreadsheet each week, use a different filename with all the data still in the spreadsheet, save it as (for example,) MyPoints Calculator-Suzie xls. Then click on the Reset All Data button and do a save-as with the next week s filename, for example, MyPoints Calculator-Suzie xls. You d do this at the beginning of each week, saving the previous week s data, and then Reset All Data, and save the spreadsheet with next week s filename. That s it; this should be enough information to get you up and running in your own WW program, especially if you want to do it on your own, without paying for membership, going to meetings, and buying prepared food. Best of luck! This document and the spreadsheet are copyright 2010 by The Honey Do List Guy. Page 14

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