Did I mention before that I’ve switched to counting calories? ‘Cause I have, as of last Monday. And it’s gotten my weight moving downward again. Plus I get to eat bread and noodles and pasta again, which is probably a good thing. At least my friends will stop making fun of my diet… OK, they won’t, but that’s what friends are for, right? I just keep pointing to the results — At the end of January, I was 193.5 lbs, and today I weighed in at 186.0, meaning in four weeks I dropped almost 2 lbs per week. Not bad for a “fad” diet.
Of course, the proof is in keeping the weight off. That’s one of the reasons I switched to another diet. It’s how I keep interested; finding new ways to tweak and obsess over numbers and figures. I have a spreadsheet now that I use to track daily calories, and I’m banking the extra calories every day to give myself a reward at the end of the week.
I figure, with all the working out I do, and the walking, and taking the stairs at work (my office is on the 8th floor, and I also provide support at a 7 story building plus four other locations downtown), etc. etc., I burn around 2200 calories per day. I’m allowing myself 1700 calories per day, a deficit that should lead to a pound of weight lost every week (500 calories * 7 days = 3500 calories).
But for this first week (which isn’t over), I’m averaging 1598 calories per day. Is that too little? Am I hurting myself? Don’t know. Some nights I’ve gone to bed hungry, it’s true — the days I only ate about 1450 calories per day (those are the days that have dragged my average down, I’ll admit). So it’s likely that I could be less strict and eat a bit more.
The problem is that I tend to have a huge lunch, which doesn’t leave many calories for dinner. It’s hard to find something filling that’s only 200-300 calories. I’ll have to work on a) reducing the size of my lunches, and b) finding lower-calorie dinners.
Exercise:
Ran two miles this morning! Whoo-hoo! Felt pretty good. I did less walking this time. I ran the entire first mile (after warming up for 5 minutes) then walked two blocks, then started running back. I couldn’t quite keep running back, though, and had to walk a couple of times. Finally (but before the halfway point back) I decided that I would run the block, then when crossing the street I would slow to a walk. And that did it; I could maintain that pace all the way back home.
Oh, and I did some calisthenics (pushups, stomach crunches, stretches) before running, too.
I’m kinda worried about the Shamrock Run. It’s in two weeks, and I can’t yet run continuously for more than a mile. But I’m going to keep working it.
Runners, it seems, eat a high-carb diet. Maybe my Atkins diet hurt my performance? Oh, well, I’m back on bread again, so hopefully that will help.
I’ve got 500 calories “extra” so far, and it’s sooooooo tempting to go eat a huge chocolate chip cookie. Mmmm… chocolate chip…