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October 15th, 2005
11:35 am - Calculator mad: Time to goal weight
Okay, I'm going calculator-crazy. This is a scary one. It calculates your approximate calorie needs, and given a goal weight, tells you how long to reach it and gives you a schedule of how many calories you can eat along the way. The more weight you lose, the less you can eat and still keep losing, so this gives kind of a schedule.  sushirob says I should put a link to a suicide hotline on it. :-) (It is kind of depressing, in a way.)
Time to reach goal weight
When it says "cutting intake by X%," it assumes that you're currently eating enough to maintain your current weight, and are not currently gaining or losing.
NB: If you can't reach your goal weight in 10 years, it will show no results. I noticed that when I entered 200 as my weight, and 80 as my goal weight, it didn't show me the chart for cutting intake by 5% and instead, started at 10%.
If you are entering something large like wanting to lose 100 pounds or more, your browser may have trouble loading the page. I entered my weight now as 450 and my goal weight as 180, and it loaded fine for me, but I've got beaucoup RAM. YMMV.
Zoot, if you see this, do you think I should make it refuse to show the schedule if the calorie intake per day is less than, say, 1000 or so? I kind of worry about people with eating disorders hitting the site, going down to the "cut intake by 40%" and going, "Woo hoo, I can lose 20 pounds in 2 months if I eat 200 calories a day!"
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YES! Absolutely. The online "support" for eating disorders is really frightening. Eating disorders have such a strong pull that even reading about or hearing what someone else is doing can trigger someone, but there are some scary online communities dedicated to sharing "secrets" of keeping their eating disorders going. 1200 or more is the safest amount for weight loss (you can actually meet all of your nutrient needs), but I think 1000 is a good cutoff because there may be some people with very low activity who need to go that low. Anything under that should not be supported.
Great idea, Mrs. V! Maybe you should put a disclaimer popup window if they enter something that low. I know that my original diet was 800 calories/day simply because I didn't know that was bad and I figured the less I ate the faster I'd lose. Okay. If you do something like 140 as your weight now, and 80 as your goal weight, the 30% and 40% intake thingies just say "Cutting intake by 30%: Sorry, this would put you under 1000 calories per day which is unhealthy."
I kind of liked looking at the 500 calorie a day thing, but I just know it could easily become a favorite Pro-Ana link. I feel kind of weird withholding that information, though.
Also, there are the "very low calorie" people who do okay on like 700 a day, as long as they're careful to get all their nutrients. They swear it extends life in mice and so forth. They'll get all bent out of shape.
Gr. You can't please all of the people all of the time, I guess. :-) I figured out that I could lose all the weight I wanted if I cut my head off from that site. *L*
(Cause without a head does it matter how much wieght I have to lose! :P)
Actually I didn't think it was so bad. I've bookmarked the page. But if at any point I need therapy you're paying okay. ;)
*pokeyhugs* Without a head, you would weigh 12 pounds less.
Yeah, I scare myself some days. *L* My head weighs at LEAST 35 pounds.
Because of all them brainses.
I have many many brainses in my head.
And they're really really heavy. Hehe. I like it: I always wanted a sort of scheduler like that.
To be really accurate, I should put up one that randomly sticks in gains of like 5 - 20 pounds if you're a female with comments like, "Uh, oh, that time of the month!" and "Whooops! You went to sushi bar! Too much salt intake" and "Shouldn't have had that pretzel, Laverne."
BWAHAHAHAHAAA!!!!
So this thing isn't designed for slender fellows like me whose target weight is actually greater than my current weight?
Once again, no one understands *my* needs!
;-P OOh! Bug! This is fixed now, so please try it again.
The problem was, the original version basically said, "If you eat blah blah calories, you'll gain X weight in X time." Unfortunately, it did not take into account the fact that the more you gain, the more you need to eat to keep gaining. (And vice versa for losing.)
When I made it do the weight loss schedule thingy, I forgot to allow for gain. This should be fixed. It will also show you an extra thingy for increasing your intake by 100%, unlike for weight loss. :-) Instead of all those results, prompt for the %. I really dont need to hear about taking 2618 days to hit my target goal at 5%
where is that hotline number.
Actually, it seems like a feasable tool for me. It really gave me more calories I could eat than I initially thought in order to meet my goal in 1.5 years, which is a nice healthy pace. :D |
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