Self-reporting is pretty central to using Beeminder but I think you hit on something important when you realized that maybe you had the pledges too high which caused you to not be willing to refrain from… um… doctoring the data. I love Adam’s idea of starting to track while giving yourself a LOT of space so that you get into the habit without feeling the pressure yet. It’s probably enough, at first, to just be paying attention to what your baseline is. If you did that and then just made the goal just a little harder, bit by bit, that might be a really nice way to ease into it. Very slowly. It might also keep you from being sort of unproductively mean to yourself about it. Just starting tracking is already a huge step in the right direction and it should leave you feeling like you’re already doing a lot since you in fact are.
If you find that you end up in a “Screw it; this is too much work” mood late at night when you’re tired, you might also want to have a do-more goal for entering what you’ve eaten into your food journal. Set yourself a reminder to add the +1 before bed, so that you’re sure you’re not entering the +1 at a time when you might eat again and then forget to log the food. I’d start slow on that one, too. If you’re not already logging every day, start making sure you’re logging 2 or 3 days a week, then 4 or 5, and maybe finally 6 or 7, so you’re working up to it. After all, limiting calories is more than one task since it requires first logging your calories, so ramping that up separately might take some getting used to.
Anyway, YMMV! It’s going to come down to figuring out what the linchpins are for you and tracking those. You might find that there are entirely separate things that predict how well you’re eating and that have nothing to do with calorie counting.
Personally, I need to track my food intake cause I’m a little blind as to whether I’m eating enough, too little, in a balanced way, getting enough sodium, and so on. I can end up at the end of one day and have a headache and not know why and realize it’s cause I’ve eaten 1/3 of what I’m supposed to and haven’t drank all day, and then the next day have not noticed that I had all I should probably have all day by lunch. I’m kind of unaware that way, but the things that work best for me for trying to actually change body composition have usually broken apart from that tracking. Beeminding not eating after a certain time of day (and sometimes also not eating before a certain time in the morning—a kind of intermittent fasting) has worked for me, especially in combination with not allowing myself to buy more than one food with sugar added per week or two (with some exceptions for reasons too boring to get into). I have reactive hypoglycaemia, though, so these things have helped me keep myself from riding the blood sugar roller coaster and, for me, that was enough (well… that and walking 40-60 minutes on weekdays since I walked to/from work). But the intake tracking, while useful to keep me aware of what I was eating, played little role in actually helping me with changes to body composition.
Anyway, good luck and I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts as you keep brainstorming in here as you go!
Automated: Weight/Fat trends)