My new Diet with Crate Watchers!!

Because I don't want to incur their wrath of "Crate Watchers" (please substitute the word crate with the word weight), and because I want to make this stuff available to other people, certain names have been changed to protect the guilty. That might be me, or not.

My wife, Allison, has dabbled in this pay-as-you-go club with some good results, and I have decided to semi-formally join her this time as a mooch. The nice part is that there is a lot of information about the ins and outs of Crate Watchers, so much that you don't really need to become a member to enjoy some of its benefits. The big thing you give up is the meetings, but I'm not so hot on them at the moment because of my work schedule.

The plan that Allison is on takes into account your activity level and weight to come up with an optimal number of food points to eat on any given day, and then you also get 35 "Flex Points" to distribute as you wish throughout the week. While she gets to use the online tools offered by Crate Watchers, I had to come up with something different. Being a big fan of Gmail and Google Docs, I brainstormed a way to effectively track most of the same things.

To begin with, because I don't know anything about Crate Watchers points calculation, I have to save my meal ingredients to process later. This is accomplished via SMS from my phone at mealtime. I send a message like this:

"Dinner: 3 cups macaroni & cheese, 11.5 oz mountain dew."

The message is sent to my Gmail inbox, but with the added alias "+ww". There is a filter that catches all of this email, stars and removes it from the inbox, and waits for my perusal.

The next step is the tracking spreadsheet. If I think I might not get around to processing the information soon, I'll copy my meal email into a comment for the corresponding meal on the spreadsheet. This spreadsheet compiles each day's meal points, along with activity points (in case you happen to be doing anything besides sitting during the day), and keeps track of overages that count against your Flex Points. Another page of the spreadsheet contains my weight tables, logged every week, and charted to show most total weght lost (and gained), and highest week-to-week loss. Still another page has the magic Points Calculator. I was able to put the same equation into an Excel spreadsheet so that I could put it on my phone. I'm determined to figure out enough Java to make a mini-app for my phone, which would be easier to run than modifying the Excel spreadsheet on this phone.

The timing for starting this program was actually a little strange, but made it easy for me to jump in. I was a week into a rather rigorous time at work, where I've been working swing shift, and doing LOTS of physical labor, which has helped immensely in that I didn't really have to worry about eating too much. You may be wondering what paltry bit of physical labor that could have been, given what a slack job I've been known to have. The computers I work on are not small, and the latest ones are almost too big for our oversize lab benches. They weigh in at just about 250lbs empty. I get my activity points from hauling them around the lab on a lift (I have to push/pull/steer/load/unload manually), setting them upright so they can be reconfigured, and packing them into crates for shipment (hence CRATE Watchers). The full crates weigh in at 390lbs, and I get to pull them across 60 yards of carpet between the lab and our storage areas. Needless to say, I've been wearing shorts to work the last few weeks.

As somebody who has struggled to get to a reasonable weight, and as someone living with people in the same situation, I hope that anyone needing the same help can take heart and maybe take a new look at their possibilities. If you would like to learn more about the tools I'm using, or the official tools for that matter, drop me a line. I'm not an expert at weight loss, but I'm pretty good at figuring out methods to keep folks interested in what they are doing.

Good Luck!!