The nutrition label at right shows the information you will need for your spreadsheet. The blue highlighted serving size goes in Column C. The yellow highlighted goes in Column D. The pink highlighted goes in Column E.
The Fear No Math Diet
Download spreadsheet for women
Download spreadsheet for men
(requires Microsoft Excel)Losing weight actually isn't difficult. It's easy -- you just have to eat fewer calories than your body needs. It's so easy it's boring. Eating as much as you like is much more interesting than weighing and measuring everything you eat. But if you are really serious about losing weight, you have to measure. If you aren't ready to be obsessive-compulsive about this, you aren't really serious yet.
The Weight Watcher's program, which assigns a value to each food, tries to translate that into something you can do without actually weighing things. It's a good program if you really follow it. But if you cheat and overestimate the size of a deck of cards or whatever portion size is indicated, you won't lose weight.
This diet plan avoids estimation. If you were good at estimating a proper size portion, you wouldn't be overweight in the first place. In this plan, everything that goes in your mouth has to be measured, preferably by weight or liquid measure. You enter the calories and protein content based on the information on the package or on information available on the internet. The spreadsheet calculates how many calories you actually ate and keeps a total. It can be used on a handheld computer and synchronized with your computers at home and work so you can enter foods all day. You should get a diet scale for home and one for work, too. You also want a good bathroom scale to weigh yourself every day. A digital one is nice, because it's encouraging to see your weight go down even by tenths of a pound.
Obviously, situations will come up where it isn't possible to pull out the diet scale and weigh the food. But you try to keep those times to a minimum, and you rely on the experience you will get from measuring all the other food to improve your ability to estimate the size of the foods you can't measure. You may also find that although the diet scale looks dorky, it stops other people from trying to push you to have second portions if they know you're going to weigh them.
It is very helpful to have some foods you eat on a daily basis. If you have corn flakes every morning, for instance, weigh the portion you want to eat, measure the milk that you want to put on it with a cup measure, and write those down. Then every morning measure out the same amounts. If every day you take a container of light yogurt for lunch, you will have a premeasured portion and have the calorie information on the size of the package. Fat-free dairy products are excellent foods to include if you aren't lactose intolerant, since they are high in protein, low in calories, and do contain some carbohydrates.
How to use the spreadsheet
When you open the spreadsheet, there are an intimidating number of columns. Most of them don't require any input from you. Once you have used it for a few days and get the idea of how it works, it will be very easy to use. If you stick with it, you are guaranteed to lose as much weight as you want.
Start in Column U. Enter your current height in inches, weight in pounds, and age in years in the colored cells. This will automatically calculate your current calorie requirements in Column Q and keep track of them as you lose weight (your requirements go down a bit as you lose).
Now go to Column A. Skip the first couple rows, and put the date of the first day of your diet in A3.
In B3, you put the name of the first food you eat. Look at the package to find out the "serving size" and put that in C3. Then put the number of calories in one "serving size" in D3. Put the grams of protein in E3.
F3 is the important one -- that's where you put the amount you actually measured out for yourself. It may be wildly different from the amount listed for a portion size on the package. But the spreadsheet calculates it all out for you.
Columns G, H, and I tell you how many portions you ate and how many calories and grams of protein were included - not very important.
Column J is critical. That will have your total calories for the day. You have to look at column Q and see how many calories you usually eat to stay at the weight you currently are at. To lose one pound a week, you must stop eating at 500 calories less than that. So if Column Q says 2500 calories, you have to stop eating when Column J gets to 2000 calories.
Column K keeps track of how many grams of protein you have eaten for the day. You can't eat 2000 calories of potato chips and Pepsi, take a vitamin pill, and call it a diet. You have to ensure you get enough nutrients, and protein is something you aren't going to get in a vitamin. Column R lists your actual protein requirements. So if you only have a few hundred calories left for the day and you haven't reached your protein requirement, you better find a high protein food to eat. (You also have to get enough calcium. If you aren't eating a lot of dairy products, take a calcium supplement like Tums.) Column P gives you a measure of how much protein a particular food has compared to its calories, and may help you learn which foods will fill out your requirements.
Column L keeps track of the calories you have eaten since your diet started. It is just used to calculate some of the other columns, and you can ignore it.
Column M is your actual weight from weighing yourself on a scale each day. Column N is the weight the spreadsheet calculates you should be at based on what you have listed as foods you have eaten.
The calorie requirement formula has a fudge factor for activity level. Adults are assumed to have an activity level that uses 30% more calories than they would use if they were in a vegetative state. But your activity level may be more or less. You'll see after a few weeks whether the numbers are getting a lot different. If your activity level is less, you may need to eat fewer calories to achieve the pound-a-week weight loss goal. (You can actually graph the two sets of weights by selecting all the data in Columns M and N from row 3 down to your last row of entries after you have been on the diet a while, then choosing "Insert" from the top task bar, then "Chart," then choosing a line graph.)
Column O is just used to calculate Column N, and you can ignore it. Column P is information about the protein density of foods, as mentioned above. It will give an error for any foods with zero calories; ignore it. Columns Q and R are your calorie and protein requirements, as mentioned also.
Columns V, W and X are just for calculating formulas, and are minimized in width so they don't show.
Y12-AJ12 is a pink line that includes some formulas. It is used in between days to keep the numbers from adding to the previous day's total. At the start of each day, you just copy those pink cells and paste them on the cells G through R on the next line of the spreadsheet. In column M of that row you just pasted, type in the weight you got when you weighed yourself that morning. The next row below that pasted row will be the first row of the new day. Enter that day's date in Column A, and the first food of the day in column B as on the first day.
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What do you do with foods without nutrition labels? There are a ton of websites to provide this information. The government even provides a calculator so you can choose which units you want to measure your food in:
USDA Nutrient Data Laboratory -- this is the basic list of foods; start here
DietFacts.com -- additional foods by brand name
Calorie King
Fast Food Nutrition Fact Explorer
University of Puget Sound Food Service -- one of many university food services that posts nutrition information; useful when you are eating buffet or catered meals. Everybody serves those same wraps.
Iowa State University Food ServiceIn addition, more and more company websites provide nutrition information. For instance, Qdoba (a Mexican fast food restaurant) will calculate calories including any extra toppings you request, which is pretty sporting of them considering how many calories are in those burritos! Other companies may not include it on their website, but will tell you verbally if you call their home office.
Occasionally you're going to go over your daily limit -- you aren't going to miss holiday celebrations. But try to calculate the calories anyway, then get back on track the next day to try to offset the extra calories.
Here is an example of a spreadsheet with several days of foods entered. Notice that nobody is starving on this diet, yet the dieter is still eating even less than the 1843 calories that would give her one pound a week weight loss. In fact, when she gets down to her goal weight of 110 lbs., she'll have to eat more than this or she'll get too thin.
As you can see, this dieter has a few foods she eats regularly, like her breakfast cereal, or the skim milk she always drinks from the same size cup. She can just copy and paste the data from a previous entry instead of looking it up again. If she eats a different amount, she just changes Column F. She can also copy the pink line from the day before instead of going up to line 12 every day. (This spreadsheet is going to get long.)
Notice also that her real weight isn't coming down in a straight line, and that the first few days there more weight loss than you would expect because she's probably eating less sodium than she was and isn't retaining as much water. She may also have started her diet at That Time of Month because that was when she got really shocked looking at the bathroom scale in the morning.
She doesn't have high blood pressure or heart/kidney disease, so she doesn't have to watch salt; if she was, she might want to add another column to track sodium. And she isn't diabetic, so she only needs to track total daily calories -- if she eats too much early in the day, she has to stop eating. A diabetic would also have to spread out the calories throughout the day and avoid large amounts of sugar at one sitting.
©2006 Eileen K. Carpenter, MD
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