I am trying to gain weight.  I’ve tried forcing myself to eat when the thought makes me nauseous, I’ve tried protein bars, protein shakes, eating constantly throughout the day….with mostly no results.

About a year or so ago I lost a bunch of weight.  Since my normal body weight (all my life) has been under the “average” weight for people my age, dropping significantly under even that is not the greatest.  Thankfully, I haven’t lost any more.  But I have also been unable to gain.

Enter My Fitness Pal.  My sweetheart was helping me look online for some tools to help track what I eat and figure out how to eat better to try to gain.

You do have to create a (free) account, but once you are registered, you enter your height, current weight, and weight goal.  You also can choose how much you want to gain (or lose) each week.  After that, you have a daily food diary where you put in what you ate and how many servings.  They then tell you how many calories, carbs, fat, and protein were in that food.  At the bottom is a total of what you have consumed so far and how many more you have to go that day.

On another tab is an exercise diary.  It is much the same, in that you enter what you did for exercise and for how long.  They then tell you how many calories you burned.

I only signed up on Saturday, but I am already very excited and impressed.  I hope this will help remind me to eat and exercise and that I will actually see results.  I have a very fast metabolism, so hopefully we will be able to accurately factor that in as well.

Anyway, if you are looking for a helpful source to keep you on track to gain or lose weight….so far I really recommend My Fitness Pal.  They do have apps for phones…which is very helpful when you are away from home and your computer.  You can still record your food!

My goal is to gain about eleven pounds to get back to my normal weight.  I entered that I would like to gain 1 1/2 pounds a week.  We’ll see how this goes over the next couple of months!

-Bonnie