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Friday, March 13th, 2009
Worse than I thought, I’m up to 233.4 lbs. 44.7% fat40.4% water. I hate being more fat than water! At my weight, 4.3% difference means I need to lose 10 lbs of fat to become tied. Since I like being more water than fat, I’m going to set my first minigoal at 18 lbs. It could take as long as 2 months to lose that much weight at a reasonable pace and that’s a long enough time to work towards a goal. It might come off quicker though since 15 of those pounds were put on in the last month. I ate a lot of processed foods and I find they stick to the linings of your body a long, long, long time. One of the many negatives of highly processed foods. Since I’ll be replacing those HPC’s (Highly Processed Carbohydrates) with minimally processed carbs I hope to lose some of that baggage quickly. By the way, when I reach a minigoal I reward myself. But NEVER with food. Rewarding yourself with gorging or eating something you’ve decided isn’t healthy for you just imprints on your brain that you are punishing yourself by eating your new way. Why would you want to feel that badly about yourself? Heck no. Every day you eat things that are good for you you’ll feel a little better. Your knees and hips and back and most of all your FEET will hurt a little less, you will feel proud of yourself for your accomplishments.
Let me start out with why I think people like me are fat. I like to eat and I hate exercising. That deserves emphasis:
I like to eat and I hate exercising!
Seriously, any diet that has me eating something smaller than the palm of my hand and doing jumping jacks is going to fail. 98% do fail, guess why. People like to eat and we don’t want to exercise. It’s genetic. The desire to eat very little and run in place for 2 hours is abnormal. Seriously. The availability of large quantities of unhealthy food and the freedom to lounge around is very new. We don’t have genes that are adapted to that. So we need to figure out ways to work with our innate desires rather than fight them. I do that by eating large volumes of very low calorie foods and two potatoes a day. That’s right, two whole potatoes a day. One sweet potato and one baked Idaho tater along with a large assortment of veggies/salads, some fruits and fluids. Good carbs. Lightly processed.
I don’t have time to put everything up here in one day and this is probably not going to be laid out in the manner you’d (or I) would like. But I feel I have to tell you at this point that the first thing you have to do is figure out how many calories you should be eating a day to not gain weight. There are 3500 calories in a lb of fat. To lose 2-3 lbs per week you have to eat 7-10 thousand calories less than you burn. How many do you burn? Well here’s your first guesstimate at your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) I did the calculations using my information:
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English BMR Formula
Women:
655 + (4.35 x weight in lbs.) + (4.7 x height in inches) - (4.7 x age in years)
Men:
66 + ( 6.23 x weight in lbs.) + ( 2.7 x height in inches) - (6.8 x age in year )
Age 53
Height 66
Weight 233
Harris Benedict Formula
Daily Calorie Needs
BMR Sedentary Light activity Moderate
Women 1739.65 2087.58 2392.01875 2696.4575
Men 1995.39 2394.468 2394.468 2394.468
Be Honest! It will show up when you do not lose weight otherwise.
Sedentary very little or no exercise
Light activity light exercise 3 days a week
Moderate moderate exercise 5 days a week
Activity Multiplier Used above
Sedentary = BMR X 1.2 (little or no activity, desk job)
Lightly active = BMR X 1.375 (light activity/sports 1-3 days/wk)
Mod. active = BMR X 1.55 (moderate activity/sports 3-5 days/wk)
Very active = BMR X 1.725 (hard activity/sports 6-7 days/wk)
Extr. active = BMR X 1.9 (hard daily activity/sports & physical job or 2X day training, i.e marathon, contest etc.)
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So we can see from the above that at my age and weight I need 2392 calories a day to stay right where I am (more or less) assuming I’m lightly active. I know, I’m asking you to do math. And worse yet, over time you’ll need to do that math again. Why? Because as you lose weight, your caloric needs go down. Doesn’t THAT suck.. sighs.. well it’s reality. You can mak,e up for it somewhat if you put weights on yourself all day long, I don’t think that’s the way to go. Afterall, the biggest benifit of losing weight is not having as much pressure on your joints and those poor little feet! I highly recommend putting the formula into excel or one of the free spreadsheet programs. Set it up so it uses the age and weight cells and not so it’s just a formula that way as your age goes up (sorry, although I hope you feel younger I haven’t figured out how to reverse the fourth dimension) and your weight goes down you can just stick the new numbers in and see what your goal calorie figure is. Also, your activity level might increase… when your feet feel better you just feel like walking or dancing more. Let me stress that this is just an estimate of your caloric needs. I found it was consistantly slightly low for myself, maybe I was more active than I thought.
OK so now I have a number 2392 calories a day, times 7 is 16744 calories a week. To lose 2 lbs a week I would have to eat 7000 calories a week less which is 1000 calories a day meaning 1392 calorie a day diet. But because I take Fridays off the diet (we’ll discuss why later) that 7000 has to be divided by 6 instead of 7 bringing it to 1166 calories a day less which gives me 1225 calories a day of food I can eat and lose 2 lbs. a week. To lose 3 lbs. a week I’d have to reduce my consumption to 1041 calories a day OR increase my activity level by which I do not mean exercise.
One more thing for today then I’ll stop. For lunch today I had a baked potato with a cup of salsa and a cup of brocolli. For dinner I’m planning a giant salad with a few nuts and a small amount of cheese. I also plan to eat a yellow sweet pepper, an apple, and maybe some carrots.
Tomorrow I want to talk about another useful too, the kitchen scale, measure my starting stats and talk about how not to exercise and lose weight.
