RicksWeightLoss.com - Using the Database

Using The Database

The online database is a great tool to track your weight loss. It will track calories in and calories out: your meals and your exercise. Like all systems, garbage in = garbage out. Be honest with yourself and track your food and activity honestly - you'll have better results that way.

Why use the online database? Well, it makes keeping track of your meals easy because all of the calories for popular food items are already in here for you. Plus, you can keep weeks or even months worth of data so you can see your eating or exercise history.

I've kept the screens very simple without a lot of pictures, color, or formatting. There are two reasons for this. First, I want to get the system functional first, and then I'll add some formatting. Second, and most importantly, I want this web site to be usable on mobile devices (phones, PDAs, etc.) so that you and I can use it while we're out and about. The pages are actually formatted to fit nicely on my PocketPC and my Sidekick phone.

Creating an Account

The first thing you have to do to use the database is to create an account. The database is FREE, so it's not going to cost you anything. Go to the Database page and click on the LOGON link. If you're new to the system, click on the Create a New Account link. (Click on any of the pictures below for a larger image).

Everything you type in here is personal - except for your username. Nobody will see it but me. So, enter in a username, type in a password twice, and give me your real first and last names.

Now, I need to know your gender, height, and date of birth. Certain body fat calculations we'll perform depend on knowing your age, sex, and height. Type them in now - don't be modest. I don't care.

Now enter in a challenge question and response... in case you forget your password you will be asked this. Don't make it something too easy.

Now if everything was successful you'll be brought back to the main menu. Go ahead and type in your password now to log in. If you want the system to automatically remember you next time you log on (so you don't have to type in your password) then click on the Remember Me box.

Weighing In

Now, before you can use the system you have to Weigh In. You should do this at least once a week. Go ahead and weigh yourself now. Enter in your weight (in pounds - tenths are OK too if your scale gives them). Also, if you have a scale that calculates body fat percentage (and I strongly recommend you get one), you can enter that in here too. If not, don't worry - you can leave it blank. You will also note that today's date and time are pre-populated for you. If you want to put in some notes for yourself (like a diary entry) go ahead.

Main Menu

You will now be taken to the Main Menu. Now there is a lot of data here. Don't worry if it seems overwhelming. It's all designed to give you a quick and easy glance at your fitness and daily stats. Also, the menus might change from time to time as we make minor changes to the system - so bear with me.

The first thing you will notice is your Current Weight. Yeah, the stuff you just typed in. If you gave the system your body fat measurement (if your scale supports it) then you will see how many pounds of fat and how many pounds of lean tissue (muscle, bone, water) you're carrying around. The system will also tell you whether you are obese, overweight, or normal. Notice Hrothgar here is Obese.

If you click on the Body Fat link, the system will give you a chart showing the healthy ranges. Here's the chart for men:

Your BMI (body mass index) is also calculated. This has nothing to do with your fat percentage - it's simply a ratio of your weight to your height. Hrothgar is above average - that means he weighs more than most people of his height. However, if we didn't know he was obese, he could just be very muscular, or even "big boned." BMI really just tells you how you compare to others of your height.

The system will then tell you your last weigh in date. Next comes your BMR, or Basal Metabolic Rate. This is how many calories your body will burn throughout the course of the day if you did absolutely nothing but sit there and breathe. Your body burns calories just to process oxygen, pump blood through your veins, and watch TV. Now, we obviously want to burn a whole lot more than that, but this is a start. As you can see right now, Hrothgar is burning 1778 calories per day just watching the Star Trek marathon.

Now, if you gave the computer your body fat percentage, you will also see a second calculation for BMR. There are multiple ways of calculating BMR. The second method here uses age, height, weight, and gender and is NOT as accurate as the first number - which uses body fat measurements. However, you only get that number if you know your body fat... again, another reason I recommend you purchase a scale that calculates body fat (they're not perfect, but they're good enough to see trends).

OK, next the system gives you how many calories you've eaten today, how many you've burned (exercise), your net calories (the difference between those two) and then your net calories minus your BMR burn for the day. Your goal is to make your Net-BMR value (the bottom line) be LESS THAN ZERO. If it's is less than zero, you will lose weight. If it is greater than zero, you will gain weight. It's that simple!

BUT... you have to feed HONEST numbers into the system. I recommend you OVER-estimate the calories you're eating and UNDER-estimate the calories you're burning. This way, you are sure to be tracking numbers that are in your favor instead of wondering why you're not seeing any progress. Now, how far negative do you want this number to be? That's the million dollar question!

I recommend a modest weight-loss goal of 1 to 2 pounds a week. TOPS! Now, if you plan to lose one pound a week, and one pound equals 3500 calories, and 3500 divided by 7 (days) equals 500, then you should try to make sure that your bottom line figure (NET-BMR) is around -500.

If you're around -100 or -200, you're not going to notice a great drop in weight. If you're too far negative, say -1000 or more on a regular basis, your body is going to go into starvation mode and hang on to it's fat. So I recommend you stagger your calories. Do two days at -500, then a day at -1000, then a day at +500 (so your body thinks it's getting enough food) then two more days at -500, and so on. Keep your metabolism running with frequent meals too! We'll talk more about this later.

Now, as you can see, Hrothgar just created his new account... so his values are blank.

You can see, however, that Hrothgar's NET-BMR burn is at -1623... so if he didn't eat or exercise today at all (which is not healthy) his body would have burned off 1623 calories.

Using the Food Journal

Now, it's time for Hrothgar to eat. So, from the Main Menu, let's click on the Food Journal link.

Now you can see here that Hrothgar's food journal is empty. Let's add a single item. Let's say he just ate an apple. Click on the Add Single Item link.

If you know the nutritional information for an apple, you can go ahead and type it in here. For the sake of teaching you how the system works, let's type it in:

The only information you have to type in is the name of the item and the calories eaten. That's it. Now, click on the submit button. You've just added that piece of food to your food journal.

Now, let's say that you eat a specific food all the time and you want to store that piece of food in your own personal food database. You need to enter in some additional information, but it's real easy to do. Again, click on Add Single Item.

Now, I'm going to type in Yogurt, Fat Free for the name. I'm eating a cup of it, so I'll put in that I've eaten 100 calories. Again, leave the food group blank. Now, the info on the bottom of the form will be stored in the database with this food item - so type in the Calories Per Serving which in this case is 100, and the Serving Size which is "cup". You could put "1 cup," but I don't. I've just eaten 1 serving, so type that in here too. If you want to add notes, you can - they're just for you. Then make sure you click on the Add to My Food List box. This will store the food item for you in your own personal food database. Now click Submit.

Now, a little later in the day, you want to have some more yogurt. Click on Add Single Item. This time, instead of typing all that in again, just click on the Lookup link.

Here you will see the food databases. You have your own personal food list, and the system food list. Now, I have populated the system food list with dozens of popular food choices. Feel free to browse through it and select foods from it - eggs, breads, meats, and all kinds of nutritional information is stored in here. However, if you don't find exactly what you're looking for, you can add it to your personal food list. Just drop down the box, and pick the food you want. Then type in the number of servings you had.

Notice some of the food items might be in the list more than once - with different serving sizes. For example, here you can see dried apricots listed both "ea" for each one, or "g" for grams. You'll find that a lot - sometimes it you're having just a couple, it's easier to put them in "ea." but if you're grabbing a bowl-full you might want to get the scale out and measure the grams - its more accurate that way. Notice once I make my selection and type in the servings, the data is loaded into the food journal entry form.

OK, let's talk about the food groups for a moment. These are not your typical food groups that the US Food & Drug Administration gives you. I've broken food groups down into: Protein, Carbs, Dairy, Green Veggies, Non-Green Veggies, Fats & Oils, Nuts, Fruits, and Junk. For more information on how these work, and how much you should be eating of each, click on the Food Group link in the database. As you can see, Apricots (one of my favorite dried fruits) are a "R" for fruit.

Adding Entire Meals

Adding your food items one-at-a-time can be very monotonous. So, you can add entire meals all at once. Here's how I like to do it. Click on the Add Entire Meal link.

You will be brought to a big long screen where you can enter in the date/time of your meal, and give your meal a title - just so the meal stands out in your journal, I like to type these in ALL UPPERCASE LETTERS.

Now, if you're entering food items that are in your food database, you can select them here, and type in the number of servings you had. Note: you don't have type type in "1" if it was only one serving. That will be assumed. Also, for fractions of a serving, enter the value as a decimal. You may add up to ten items per meal.

If you have items that are NOT in your food database, but you don't think you'll eat them enough to really warrant putting them in there, you can type up to ten of them at the bottom...

When you're done, click on the SUBMIT button (don't worry about Saved Meals for now).

Now, notice your journal is filling up nicely...

If you want to edit or delete any food item, just click on it and that will take you into it. If you wish to delete an item, just click on it, check the Delete This Item box, and hit submit. That will remove it from your food journal, but not your food database. We'll look at the database later.

The Activity Journal

Now that we know how to put food into the system, let's see how to exercise. Click on the Main Menu link at the top of the window to go back to the main menu.

Now, click on the Activity Journal link.

Just like adding a single food item, you can add a single activity.

Type in "Jog to store" for the activity name, and 100 for the calories burned. Also type in that you ran for 12 minutes. That's it. That's all you need to do, if you know how many calories you burned.

Submit your data, and you'll see it on the Activity Journal.

Now, since you might not always be able to tell exactly how many calories you burned, I've pre-populated a listing of many different types of activities. I've assigned them each a difficulty from 1 to 100 (and some are even higher) based on the relative difficulty of those items. Yes, these numbers are arbitrary, but they work well for me. Obviously if you take something like playing baseball, you can have a real strenuous game with lots of running, or you could have a game where you "ride the pine" for five innings. You have to be the ultimate judge of how many calories you think you're burning... don't worry... it gets easy to figure out after you get the hang of it.

OK, so click on Add Single Activity again... click on the Lookup link, and you'll see you again have your own private list of activities that you can populate just like you did with food items. Plus, you have Rick's system activities. Drop those down, and select Bicycling 10-14 mph. This is a comfortable bike ride speed for most people. You'll see that I've assigned it a difficulty of 62 (out of 100 or so).

Type in that you performed the activity for 60 minutes.

Click submit. You'll see that you have burned off 821 calories. Congratulations! That's a good workout. If you want to change any of the numbers here, go ahead. Likewise, you can also click on the Add to My Activity List box if you want to save this data to your personal list of activities.

Notice your activity journal is starting to fill up too.

Now, here's a trick that I often do... if I know that a bike ride, say, to the local store takes me exactly 10 minutes and I burn off 150 calories, I'll create my own Single Activity that says:

Bike To Store - 10min - 150cal

And then I'll just select that item from the list. Now, the system isn't designed to store this kind of information YET (perhaps it might be by the time you read this) so you have to just re-type it in when you select it from your lookup list. I know - I'll get to adding this feature in the near future because it's a pain in the butt for me too. For now, it's a workaround... and it lets you add known walks/jogs/bike trips to your journal easily.

Remember... whether your walk a mile, jog a mile slowly, or sprint a mile fast, you're burning about the same number of calories. It's just that a sprint will get you there much faster. Actually, I've found that walking a distance (say X miles) actually burns more calories than running the same distance - because you're exercising for a longer period of time. So, if you're looking to strictly burn calories, walking is just as effective as running however short runs are much better for heart & lung health (cardiovascular improvement) and will actually raise your metabolic rate for the rest of the day! So... both in moderation!

More Main Menu

Now... back to the database... now for the rest of these examples, I need to show you REAL DATA, so I'm going to log out of Hrothgar's user record, and log into my actual account.

Alright, as you can see, I currently weigh in at 184 pounds, 22.7% body fat, and today I've eaten 2525 calories and burned off 970 (yeah, I know, I still have to get on my stationary bike tonight for half an hour or so). My NET-BMR (the important number) is -137. This means I'll lose a little weight unless I burn off some more calories today - remember, I want this number to be about -500. I'm going to bike some tonight, and probably have a small snack of veggies... but I should get this number down a bit more (plus, it's currently about 11pm... that NET-BMR figure is updated to the minute, so I have about another hour of BMR burn to go today (1769 / 24 = about 74 calories) that is just from breathing - and watching Stargate SG-1 on my DVR. Ha ha ha.

More to come....