Weight loss takes time

Recently a friend said, "Have you lost weight? I came up from behind you, and you don't look the same."

Well, I'm glad my behind looks different these days. I told her, "Yes, I've lost 35 pounds since May."

She asked how I did it.

"Ruthless calorie counting. I have an app for that."

Tap & Track HD may not be the best calorie-counting app, but it's working for me. I chose this app from among the many calorie-counting apps available because it doesn't require an Internet connection to access its calorie database, as others do. All the data is stored in the app.

When I say losing weight takes time, I don't only mean it requires months to lose in a healthful way. I mean several minutes at each meal need to be invested in calculating and recording one's intake. Weighing or measuring each portion takes time.

Tap & Track helps cut down on this time with its list of common foods and an extensive list of restaurants. I looks like pretty much every restaurant chain that publishes its nutritional information on the web is included. So, for example, I now know that my Chipotle chicken bowl contains 540 calories. That's almost 40 percent of my calorie allotment for a day, so I'm trying to discipline myself to eat only half the bowl. In fact, I've learned that at just about every restaurant, it's a good idea to take whatever meat and carbs they bring you and cut the portions in half.

The app is a little rough around the edges:

• It has a favorites list for things you eat often, but it doesn't handle nonpackaged foods like fruit and vegetables well. When you pick an item from the food list, you can measure in grams or cups, or in the case of fruit, "one medium," etc. But add it to the favorites list, and you're limited to fractions of a serving, which requires knowing what the original serving size was. It turns out to be more precise to just pick it from the master list every time and enter the portion size in grams, since I prefer to weigh. The favorites list does work well for packaged goods like cereal bars and bread, where the serving size is uniform.
• The recipes feature is useful, but would be better if it were possible to edit the quantities. For example, l started with a salad recipe that was half romaine and half spinach, but decided to use more romaine and less spinach. I couldn't just change the quantities. I had to delete and re-add the ingredients.
• l love that the help file is built-in instead of being online, but its grammar needs some help.
• There are some typos in the food list, e.g. diary instead of dairy, drak instead of dark. OK, that's a really picky nit. Sorry.

Enough complaining. Here's what I like:

• There's a list of previous items which keeps track of several days' worth of items, which is useful for creatures of habit like me who tend to eat the same things repeatedly. Things I eat every day, like apples and tangerines, I can just pick from the previous list instead of looking them up in the master list every time. Unlike the favorites list, the previous list remembers the unit of measurement I used last time, so if I had a 52-gram tangerine yesterday and today one that's 56 grams, I just have to change the number.
• The overview screen shows a breakdown by nutrient type, so l can see when I'm overdoing the carbs. Which is often.
• The history page lets me see how good -- or bad -- I've been during the week.
• The profile automatically calculates my daily calorie count based on my current size and sedentary job.
• The exercise list shows that I could burn more calories at yoga than t'ai chi, and informs me that 20 minutes of housecleaning burns 87 calories.

This may not be the best calorie tracker (My rating: 4 of 5 stars), but it's the best $5 I ever spent.

What color is arthritis?

While shopping this weekend, I found a wide assortment of pink-ribbon branded products, sold as fundraisers for breast cancer research.

You can get a pink-ribbon day planner, pink-barrelled pens, a pink-ribbon cookbook; I lost track, frankly, of them all.

The breast cancer foundation really has its fund-raising act together. Or maybe it's just that women like to buy pink things.

But what about those of us who have other medical conditions? Can a guy not buy a manly planner to raise funds for prostate cancer research?

Heart disease affects far more women than breast cancer, yet the heart association's "Go Red" campaign has a long way to go before it matches the power that is the breast-cancer-research fundraising juggernaut.

This despite the fact that heart disease is the leading cause of death for Americans. Cancer—which is to say, all forms of cancer combined—is the No. 2 cause.

Meanwhile, although arthritis isn't a primary cause of mortality, 21 percent of American adults are living with it.

Let's compare shopping opportunities, shall we?

The American Heart Association's Go Red for Women site carries Red-branded clothes, jewelry, and household items.

The Susan G. Komen for the Cure's Promise Shop carries clothing, accessories, furniture, and a pink iPod Nano case.

At the Arthritis Foundation's store, you can get exercise videos, books, and free pamphlets. Whoo-hoo.

You see the problem. Other foundations need to tap into the same shopping gene that's done so well for the Komen group.

I mean, wouldn't it be great if all of us were able to fund research into the disease that most affects us just by buying pajamas?

One more reason to keep your pants on

The Centers for Disease Control and prevention released a scary statistic today: one in four teen girls in America has a sexually transmitted disease.

The New York Times article on the subject concludes with this:

"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends annual screening tests to detect chlamydia for sexually active women under age 25. The federal agency in Atlanta also recommends that women between ages 11 and 26 be fully vaccinated against HPV"

Excuse me? Age 11?

Isn't that rather like being vaccinated for yellow fever when you're not going to Africa?

I understand that the CDC wants women to be vaccinated before they become sexually active, rather than after, but come on—isn't the bar being set a little too low here?

Oddly enough, I can't seem to find the statistic on how many teenage boys have STDs. Not even by searching the CDC's Web site for "teen boys STD." Apparently they haven't gotten around to doing that study yet.

Would I sound like a conspiracy theorist if I wondered aloud whether that's because there isn't a trendy new vaccine to push on 11-year-old boys?

Perhaps.

Regardless, I'm sure those teenage girls didn't pick up those STDs out of thin air.