Another day, another daily report! My food journal is kept every day, even every meal. This blog post is written every day. My life as someone whose eating and weight are coming under control, is lived one day at a time. Each day is a chance to live life fully and well – through the lens of my body’s weight.
Those of you who have read my work before know that I am not rich in sustained willpower. I do this every day because I successfully made a one-time change. I changed myself into someone who cared a lot about how much he weighed. But so what? Caring doesn’t lose any pounds. I needed a mechanism. How could I lose weight, having failed many times before?
My food intake and calorie count
Breakfast – skipped (not hungry)
- 0 calories
Lunch – 2 x bratwurst (280); half bread wrap (50)
- 610 calories
Dinner – 7 x pizza slices (100)
- 700 calories
Snacking – tea with half and half (80); half chicken sandwich (250)
- 330 calories
Total for the day: 1640 calories (limit 1800 + 500 bonus from swimming, total 2300)
What a week
A week full of struggle, failure, recovery, and triumph has just ended. On second thought, hold the triumph. I won’t know about triumph until Saturday morning when I weigh in. Keeping a food journal isn’t enough, you have to check it against reality from time to time. I weight myself every week and write that down. Any triumph only exists on paper, or at least in my food journal, for now. I write down what I eat, count calories, and check my weight. The whole system works well for losing weight and gives me lots of information I can use to understand myself and enrich my life.
I have had good weeks and bad weeks. On a good week, I try to average 1850 calories per day. Over seven days of the week, that comes to about 13,000 calories.
This week, due to having a couple of days where my eating was out of control, I ate about 15,000 calories. The good parts are (1) I recovered and am looking forward to a chance for a better week ahead, and (2) I should lose weight anyway, at 15,000 calories – just not as much as usual. The loss will be less, or slower, than last week when it was nearly 3 pounds. My weight loss is often between 2-3 pounds when I make my calorie targets.
Now, this calculated loss of weight is just by the calorie numbers. Normally, my diet is carefully spread out over the seven days and I don’t overeat due to my system of goals and rewards. What happens when you severely overeat on two days (Monday and Wednesday)? Would the resulting body weight be different if the whole 15,000 calories was spread out over the week? Even after months of fairly steady weight loss, I never know what is going to happen when I get on the scale Saturday morning. Today I was getting some mixed messages from my body (today was a swimming day). My stride felt springy and energetic. However, my lap times were not particularly fast.
I skipped breakfast today. I was not hungry for it, not even a little. I had lunch at 11AM because by then I was hungry, with a strong adjective in front of it. I’m not sure what to make of the fact I wasn’t hungry all morning. Maybe it’s nothing. I will find out tomorrow, but in any case next week is a new week. Live it to the best you can!
-The Doctor