Daily Blog Archives
Check out my daily blogs from days gone by.
October 29th, 2007
So a day after proclaiming that this was going to be a daily blog, I miss a day on here. Thankfully, I haven't missed a workout or slipped on the diet. I did decide to up my daily calories to 1500-1700. I have been losing about 2.4 pounds a week up to now but was originally doing that with no workout. I had started with 1200-1500 calories a day which was too low. I may have been losing lean muscle mass along with the fat. I upped that to 1400-1600 which I think was right on target but now that the workouts are intense, I decided to up it slightly. I don't expect to gain much muscle during this phase but I definitely don't want to lose the lean muscle mass I do have.So, like I said before, I've lost the majority of my weight by just changing my diet, without much exercise. Think about it...One Hostess Twinkie (not the package but one Twinkie) has 150 calories. That would take about 30 minutes of brisk walking to burn off. A Snickers and a can of Coke has about 425 calories. That would take nearly an hour on the treadmill. So, it's much easier to eliminate the high calorie foods than to do a ton of exercise. Tomorrow, I'll talk about how I chose to change my diet and still stay full.
Until next time...
October 27th, 2007
So today I weighed in at 182.0. That's always a good feeling. My new short term goal is to be at 178 by my birthday. That's two weeks from today. I'm saving my next cheat meal until then.So, I think it's time to start explaining what I've been doing on this "diet." I don't really think of it as a diet but more of a lifestyle change. I don't want to let myself get back to being that fat ever again.
Okay, so how have I lost 12.4 pounds in just over 5 weeks? I simply restricted my calories. I took a bunch of online surveys to determine my Basal Metabolic rate (the number of calories I need just to exist). I then added to that an estimate of the calories I burn doing my normal activities (I'm a programmer so I live a pretty sedentary lifestyle) and came up with approximately 2500 calories.
Next I know that one pound of fat equals 3500 calories. To lose one pound a week, I needed to create a calorie deficit of 3500 calories. To lose two pounds a week, I need to create a deficit of 7000 calories. 7000 calories a week equals 1000 calories a day. Therefore, I determined that I needed to restrict calories to 1500 a day to lose two pounds a week. This approach really requires no exercise. Fairly simple, right? Right.
If anyone wants to lose weight, all they need to do is determine the number of calories they normally eat, and then create a calorie deficit of 500 to 1000 calories per day. A calorie deficit of this amount will result in 1-2 pounds of weight loss per week. This is a safe amount of weight to lose. Remember, you didn't put it on overnight, don't expect to lose it overnight either. Also, I don't recommend going below 1500 calories/day for men or 1200 calories/day for women. It's a tempting thing to do but any lower and you will begin losing lean muscle along with fat. I know it is exciting to see the scale move down quickly but it's not worth losing the muscle.
Next week I will show you some of the tools I developed to keep track of my weight loss. I'm going to try to update this blog everyday. Until then...