I had someone ask me off line “why are you posting recipes all the time?” I promise it’s not because I am trying to become the next great “mommy blogger”. I don’t take enough pictures for that…

The reason is a bit of a story, so hang in there.

I am embarrassed to say that back at the beginning of February, even though I had started run/walking in January, I hit the highest body weight I have ever recorded - nearly 280 pounds (or twenty stone for the anglophiles). I had been trying to both exercise and eat better, but something wasn’t working.

In the past what has worked for me is to weigh myself every day, and then track the “exponentially smoothed moving average” to track my trend weight. This gives a picture of your true weight, adjusting a bit for the daily fluctuations that happen. In addition I have used a small notebook to track what I eat.

This time it wasn’t working. Given that I had increased my exercise it had to be my diet. So I bought a digital kitchen scale and was shocked! Turns out I am horrible at estimating portion sizes. On top of that I have discovered that often measuring by volume ends up with significantly more food than measuring by weight. Almost always I was hugely underestimating how much of each particular food I was eating (I’m looking at you Cinnamon Life). So I have started weighing and measuring almost everything I eat.

Rather than write everything in a notebook, I broke down and signed up for MyFitnessPal to track my intake. MyFitnessPal has a huge database of existing foods, and if you are making something only once, you can add individual ingredients and it will figure out the nutritional information per serving. If you are going to make things more than once, you can save a recipe. Even better, you can import a recipe from another website and it will try to figure out all the ingredients for you. This feature is fantastic.

So, that’s why all the recipes. By adding them here, I can link them directly into MyFitnessPal. I also have them available on my phone or tablet, and the kids can find and share them too.

I promise there will be biking, hiking and running updates coming… And so far, measuring and keeping track has helped me lose 2 pounds a week for 6 weeks now.