Drum Roll, Please

Ok well I'm just reaching the first assessment point of my diet/exercise regime. I've been tracking every calorie, monitoring my heart rate, and really planing a comprehensive workout and diet regimen. Of course, the basic principles never change: burn more than you eat and you lose weight. There is a lot more to it than that, though, when you're looking for healthy, sustainable weight loss.

As you can see from the tables below, a calculation based on my age, sex, height, weight, and general activity level indicates that I probably need about 2200 calories per day to maintain a steady weight. Since each pound represents 3500 calories, you need a deficit of about 500 calories per day to lose one pound a week, or 1000 per day to lose two pounds per week (the absolute max most people could hope to lose healthily). That means that to lose one pound per week my daily intake should be about 1700 calories, and to lose two pounds per week my daily intake should be about 1200 calories. My basic metabolic rate was calculated according to an activity level of 1-3 hours of vigorous exercise per week, so it's important to keep up at least that much activity at the gym to make the numbers accurate. The first table represents the daily intake of each consumption path, and the second table represents the cummulative caloric total of each path going through the week.

As the tables indicate, I started the week a little overly-ambitious and was limiting myself to 1000 calories per day. The day after I bottomed-out in the 800s I made it through the day with only 1200 calories, but by 1am that night was tired of spending ALL DAY thinking about food and decided to just get some cookies and not stress about it...12 English toffee crunch cookies and an extra 1560 calories later, I was pretty much not going to meet the 2 lbs/wk benchmark, which is
fine.

You can see in the graph of my intake levels over the week (the graph of the second table, above) where my major binge crossed me out of the 2 lbs/wk range and more towards 1.5 lbs/wk. I was exceptionally active, though, and had 5 hard workouts this week. It was also four weeks, yesterday, since I had a pizza, so I've finally had one...and it was GOOD :)

Tomorrow will be my weigh-in, so it will be interesting to see how much I've lost and see how accurate these calculations have been. When I weighed myself a week ago I was 6 lbs. less than my heaviest at the beginning of winter (let's call that number F, for fat lol), so now I should be at about F - 7.5.

I'll let you know where things end up tomorrow. I've also been keeping track of how many subway and bus rides I take (for more than a month, now!) and how much money I spend on *everything* (since 26 January), but I think this is enough numbers for one blog entry.

My goal for this next week is to keep up the working-out (although it will be tough) and not fall into the same pattern of eating way too little and then having a cookie meltdown. I'm fine where I ended up, consumption-wise, but I'd rather see myself get there on a straight line rather than one with a spike in the middle.

VC