stay in the shallow end

This is a picture of the tasty peach that I am currently consuming. It was taken with my new cell phone, which I’ve really had for about a month and a half, so not so new.

The phone is one of those rare technology purchases these days that actually exceeded my expectations. I purchased it and was just excited about having a phone with a decent digital camera on it that was the same size as my old phone. I put some songs on it to try it out as an MP3 player, and turns out it replaced my iPod for my walking to and from school. Some clever guy from Finland wrote some scripts that let it sync with iTunes, and by scrubbing all my iTMS purchases with JHymn, I can listen to all my mp3 and m4a files with ease.

The quality of the camera is great also. We were using a study room in the library when all of a sudden a class came in that had reserved the room. We had lots of notes on the board, so I quickly snapped pictures of all of them and transcribed them later.

And now that Motorola and Apple finally launched the steaming pile of crap that is the ROKR (the long-fabled iTunes Phone), the last bit of concern I had about my purchase disappeared.

I performed my weekly weigh-in this morning, and it looks like I’ve lost 29 pounds since June 19, which was 15 weeks ago. Two pounds per week is what’s considered a healthy rate of weight loss, so I’m pretty proud of myself.

The impetus for my decision to lose weight happened during Spring Break’05-02 in June. I’d been hovering around 175 before the trip, and hadn’t been too concerned about it. After that week of gluttony, though, I weighed in at 184. In seven days I gained nine pounds and lost any remaining denial that I still had my college metabolism.

So then it was time to chose a method. Rather than deal with Atkins, South Beach, the Zone, or any other of the fad diets, I thought I’d kick it old school: Burn more calories than I consume. It’s funny how I’m swayed by things like “science”.

Weighing 180 and being 5’10”, I had a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 26. A “healthy” BMI ranges from 19 to 26, so I was a few pounds away from being considered overweight. I set 22.0 as my target BMI, so at 5’10” I was shooting for a target weight of 150. To start things off, I decided I’d just see how many calories I consume with my normal eating habits.

And that’s where Calorie King comes in. They’ve got a database on their website you can access for free that has the caloric content of pretty much anything you could possibly imagine. Most chain restaurants are already loaded into the program, and they’ve got entries for random common items, like Chocolate Chip Cookies. I sprung for the software which lets me do all this stuff on my computer, and now I can tell you pretty much every meal I’ve eaten for the last 15 weeks, which is actually kind of weird. To go along with CK, I got a kitchen scale for measuring food we prepared at home. It was also a great investment… it’s shocking how small a “serving size” is of most foods.

Calorie King told me that at my current activity level to maintain my weight, each day I get 2270 net calories (calories consumed minus calories burnt through exercise). To lose weight, that number goes down to 1820. To put that in perspective, I measured that I was averaging nearly 2800 calories with my normal eating habits.

So next post I’ll discuss where I eliminated that 1000 calories from my diet and how much harder it is to burn calories rather than not consume them.