The fitCast Way

What is fitCast?

fitCast is not a diet web site. It is a very precise scale. You can use it to gain weight just as easily as you can to lose weight.

Why will this work when calorie counting has failed for me in the past?

Calorie counting is not the key component of this plan. It is a requirement for success but not the reason you will succeed. With fitCast, you will eventually displace the extrinsic motivation of seeing the scale change with the intrinsic motivation of knowing exactly how much weight you've lost or gained each day. In all but the longest term, the scale will actually be less accurate at showing your weight loss than fitCast's prediction.

Who is fitCast for?

fitCast is built to overcome specific dieting obstacles.

You start out fine, but the scale eventually shows you haven't lost weight for a little while, causing you to lose motivation.
What you eat seems to have little influence on how much you weigh, making cutting back seem futile.
You overeat once or twice, the scale shows you've undone weeks of work, and you give up figuring you've ruined your diet.

It also requires that you have one strength.

Doing something several days in a row must motivate you not to have today be the first failure.

What can't fitCast help me with?

fitCast cannot help you overcome any kind of binge eating disorder. If you currently eat thousands of calories in one zoned-out sitting, you will need to conquer that first. If you've been eating reasonably for a week and only eat to resolve hunger, not for the high of being very full, then you are ready for fitCast.

What's the hard part?

The most important part of using this site properly, the very hardest thing you'll have to do, and the only thing required for success, is to enter your foods on days you overeat. It is unpleasant facing up to a bad day of eating, but if you can do this, your motivation will be more tied to these numbers and less to the scale. You'll also be able to see that even a day of horrible eating may only cost you half a pound in weight gain, something that can be undone in a couple days of eating right. Not entering a day when you eat a Bloomin' Onion will mess up predictions by almost a pound, so this is an absolute necessity.

It Won't Work For Me

I have a low metabolism.: You may, but not low enough for it to be relevant to these calculations. Saying you have a significantly lower metabolism than someone else the same height, weight, and age is like saying you have a car that gets 60 mpg while everyone gets 30 mpg with the same engine. If your metabolism is truly different, more than 10% slower than a person of your stats, and you have no glaring ill effects, such as constant fatigue and cold intolerance, congratulations! You are the next stage of human evolution, possessing a unique body chemistry. Instead of wasting time on this site, visit an endocrinologist for testing. Your unique metabolic processes will soon be in a medical journal. Even if you have untreated clinical hypothyroidism (low metabolism) complete with all its debilitating symptoms, this site will still work but when it predicts you've lost 10 pounds, you will have only lost 9 pounds. That is how invariant human metabolism is.
Calorie counting is a hassle.: Entering a day's food will take five minutes tops. It involves no sweating and requires no willpower. There's no actual hassle involved in searching for the foods you ate and entering them on a web site. Your actual objection isn't the hassle; it's that you don't want to confront the quantity you're eating. You want to sit down and binge and then not think about having just put 2000 calories into your body and the guilt accompanying it. If this is the case, calorie counting won't work for you. First, you'll need to deal with binge eating disorder. After a couple weeks of eating sensible meals, you can transition to counting calories.
Counting calories is not how we were meant to live.: No, it isn't. Neither, however, were we meant to live in an environment with food so poisonous we can intake a day's sustinence in minutes and not even feel full a few hours later. Apetite regulation evolved in so different an environment that we might as well be on a terraformed planet now. Calorie counting is the equivalent of wearing a gas mask in an environment with a poisonous atmosphere.
This won't get to the root of why I overeat.: You may go your entire life never silencing the demon that drives you to overeat. Then again, you probably never beat the demon of procrastination. You just left the environment where it was most dangerous (school) and entered one where it is institutionalized (a workplace with project managers to hound you). If you're interested in finding the self-help book or magic sentence that makes you wake up one morning and think, "I never want to overeat again!" fitCast is not for you. If you want to start losing weight today and keep it off as long as you're willing to commit to a couple minutes of clicking a day, then let's get to work.; It may also be worth considering the possibility that there is no deep, emotional root cause for your overeating, no unresolved trauma, and that you simply enjoy the high of overconsumption or are genetically predisposed to overeating.
My weight gets stuck (plateaus) for weeks at a time.: No. You do not have to change your routine or "snap" your body into losing weight when it gets "stuck" by exercising differently or eating different amounts. Plateaus are a complete observational fiction and even believing in them can compromise your motivation. The numbers work because of thermodynamics and basic physical principles at the molecular level. If the numbers say you are losing weight, fat is indeed melting off your body in exactly the amount described. It is completely contradictory to suggest that calorie counting works at all, and at the same time suggest that occasionally it does not work for periods of time. Either you lose weight as predicted, or something magical is going on and you don't.; The scale does not show this due to variations in glycogen, water, and muscle mass. Drink a cup of water. You've just gained half a pound. It's vitally important, for your own motivation, to understand that when you go a week without the scale showing a change and then all of a sudden lose two pounds, it is not that you didn't lose any weight and then suddenly lost. You were losing small amounts every day just as the numbers predicted and this loss was masked by non-fat variations.

How Should I Eat?

Should I exercise?: Exercise, for those that are obese, is for entertainment purposes only. If you enjoy going for a walk every day, have at it. Other than that, it is not a good way to lose weight and only makes you lazier later on, netting you very little actual caloric defecit. That exercise is somehow valuable for weight loss is a myth perpetuated by the food industry to justify ridiculous portion sizes and borderline-poisonous foods. "If you just exercise you can eat whatever you want." False. A marathon runner only uses up as many calories in an Awesome Blossom (Bloomin' Onion) to run the entire marathon. It doesn't help that the human body is the most efficient running machine on the planet, and our ancestors hunted not by outsmarting animals but simply following the animal around for days until it collapsed of exhaustion. Even eating a single M&M requires walking a football field to burn it off. Or you can just sit around for two minutes and burn off the same M&M. Skip all that walking and just don't eat it in the first place.; Another risk of exercising is it shifts your motivation to think the exercise is the key component of your weight loss plan, so if you stop exercising, you'll believe you've failed. Better to reach your target weight and be a little less toned than never reach it at all.
Should I eat low fat, high protein, low carbs or some other combination of nutrients?: It doesn't matter. If you want to eat only cupcakes, go for it. The only relevant number is the total calories. However, budgeting calories works the same as budgeting money. Just as if you only have $1500 to spend a month, you'll buy necessities and fewer luxuries, if you have only 1500 calories to spend a day, you'll find yourself discovering foods that keep you full longer for fewer calories. These are usually high protein or high fat foods. Once your hunger is under control after a few weeks, you may want to start incorporating more delicious sugary snacks. How you spend your calories is your own journey.
Should I eat many small meals a day or one big meal?: It doesn't matter. One meal a day or six doesn't make a difference. Eating during the day or at night doesn't make a difference. Just the number of calories matter. Your only task is to distribute them to avoid being too hungry.
Is it possible to eat too little?: While starvation mode is a myth, it may not be possible to lose more than 22 calories per pound of fat per day. fitCast knows this and will remind you if you go too low.