I am craving beer. After succumbing to the flu a little over a week ago, I’m finally nearing full recovery. All that’s left is a deep couch and a little congestion.
This craving is really weird, cause I never just itch for a drink, but right now all that Guinness from Costco (15 cans for $17!) is serenading me. The only thing keeping me from downing a couple is remembering how bad I felt a few days ago and how much it would suck to slip back into feeling like that.
Must. Be. Strong.
So on October 12, I hit one hundred and fifty pounds. I stuck with the reduced caloric intake for one week for good measure, and then did my last check in and switched to weight maintenance. I can now consume 2046 calories per day, which after the last few months feels absolutely gluttonous to me.
I started my plan on June 20 and ended on October 19, which puts me at thirty five pounds of weight loss in exactly four months. Here’s a chart:
The very end of June and beginning of October are clipped, but you get the idea. I’m most amazed at how linear it is. Maybe with more data points there would have been more plateaus and drops.
I think the most important long term gain I’ve made is the knowledge of what foods are good for me and what foods aren’t. For the most part foods are about as healthy as you think they are, but a few of the exceptions are more than enough to tip the balance. In my case, one of the biggest problems was juice. I used to drink two to three cups of orange juice a day. That’s about 276 calories per day, which works out to 2.37 pounds of weight gain per month. Now if I want orange juice, I eat an orange. It requires much more effort, so I only have one when I really want one, and it’s also filling.
Ugh.. too sleepy.. I’ll finish this post later.
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.
