Atkins Math 101- Part II Courtesy of Sharon

I'm a couple of days late getting this posted, but it's here now. Sharon has now conducted her second lesson in Atkins Math. It's worth studying! I thought I knew all about fatsecret.com, but I learned things from Sharon.

Atkins Math 101- Part II

Good morning, girls! Please turn off your cellphones, take out your laptops and enter your breakfasts in Fatsecret -- and you in the back row, throw that gum in the wastebasket and enter it! Yes, even sugarless gum has carbs and should be tracked!

Today we're going to talk about RDI. But before we do, I want to thank BlueEyes for pointing out something after the last class. BlueEyes puts all her vegetables into Snacks so she can make sure she's eating enough of them. That's fine if you want to do that. But if so, you have to take your other snacks and enter them along with your most recent meal.

Let's say you have a cup of chopped tomatoes with your breakfast, and some pork rinds during recess. If you want to track your food exactly when you eat it, the tomatoes would be entered under Breakfast, and the pork rinds would be entered under Snacks. If you want to track your veggies separately, you'd enter those tomatoes as a snack -- but then you'd have to go back and add the pork rinds to your breakfast. But you shouldn't write them both down as snacks, or it just gets confusing. And thank you again, BlueEyes!

Now then: RDI. That stands for "Recommended Daily Intake". Today we'll learn why we need an RDI, and how we set it.

The New Atkins for a New You -- and I hope you've all read it; it's required reading for this course -- says you don't have to count calories unless you stop losing weight. Many of us, though, do stop losing weight at some point, even if we're very good about our ratios. That's called a "stall". And one of the ways to make sure we don't stall -- or that we get out of a stall and don't stall again -- is to make sure we're not eating too much of a good thing.

Now please look at your Fatsecret food page. Under the pie graph on the bottom right, you'll see the words "Set your Recommended Daily Intake". Click on them, please. -- Has everybody clicked? Good!

Please read the explanations below the big yellow rectangle. Now set your diet goal and your activity level. But when you do that, boys and girls, I'm going to give you a little bit of advice. Many people think they're more active than they actually are. So if you think you're active, you're probably low active, and if you think you're low active, you're probably sedentary. -- Do you have a question? -- Well, if you think you're sedentary, then enter "sedentary", but make a point of getting a bit more active. We'll talk about that in another lesson.

When you finish setting your diet goal and your activity level, click the green button that says "Calculate your RDI." And that's it, easy as pie!

Now, as you track your food, the little graph to the left of the pie graph will fill up with little green squares, and the percentage of your RDI will show. If you happen to go over 100% of your RDI, the squares will turn red. But please remember: that does not mean you've failed! There are no grades for RDI in this course. It just means you should be a bit more careful tomorrow.

Do you have a question? -- Good question! If you're tracking your food properly and your ratios are good, and you get close to 100% but you're still hungry before bedtime, what do you do? Well, that happens to me about once or twice a month, and I'll tell you what I do. I drink a glass of water, I wait about 20 minutes -- and if I'm still hungry, I eat. Not much, and wisely -- I really try never to go over 105% -- but enough that I don't go to bed hungry. Going to bed hungry is more dangerous than red squares, because you'll wake up in the middle of the night, and you'll be awake enough to eat, but not awake enough to remember to track... and maybe not even awake enough to remember to eat the right things.

Did I see another hand? -- Oh, very good! What happens if you just can't fit in your 100%? The answer is "Nothing, really" -- if it just happens once in a while, and if you've gotten in at least 90%. But if you eat less than 90% too often, your body will think you're starving, and you'll hold on to your body fat and not burn it. If you see you're having problems fitting your food in, maybe you need to eat four meals a day, not three. I eat breakfast around 6 am, track it, eat my first lunch around 11 am, track that -- and then I eat my second lunch around 3 pm and add it to my first lunch, and then I just track my dinner normally.

Thank you, girls. Please put your laptops away. Next lesson will be about Tracking Food Away From Home -- and please, anyone who hasn't read The New Atkins for a New You, please do so. I don't want to have to spring a pop quiz on you...