Today was a swimming day. I like some exercise, especially swimming. I go twice a week and take some time in the hot tub afterwards. This routine was part of my life well before I started taking control of my food intake and weighing myself weekly. It’s safe to say that swimming doesn’t make me any thinner. I don’t depend on it to, either. But swimming is one of my favorite ways to exercise, and always has been.
My daily food intake and calorie count are:
Breakfast – skipped (0); still didn’t feel well
- 0 calories
Lunch – pizza slice (100); 2 x medium carnitas wraps (300); chocolate (150); Li’l Drum ice cream (110).
- 650 calories
Dinner – 4 x small carnitas wraps (500).
- 500 calories
Snacking – tea with half and half (80), grapes (60), banana (110)
- 250 calories
Total for the day: 1400 calories (limit 1800 + 500 bonus from swimming, total 2300)
Note that I wasn’t trying to diet extra hard today. (That’s counterproductive in my book, forcing myself to starve. ) I just wasn’t very hungry. This might be due to my large lunch yesterday but is probably mostly because I have a little stomach upset since I woke up yesterday. Exercising today was a little difficult – I got winded quickly and didn’t keep up with my regular lap times as I got late into the routine. It seems like I was a little ill. Hopefully that goes away soon! Maybe I will still eat those 500 missing calories on another day if I get really hungry.
Back to exercise. Presumably there are people who can make themselves lose weight by exercise alone, but I am not one of them. Props to them, but I think my situation is more common. There are also a lot of people who have lost weight just by changing their food intake and no exercise at all. Luckily for them, that works – so long as you make the changes to your lifestyle and to your values, and not just for temporary. That way you have a great chance to make the weight stay off.
If I hated exercise, it would be harder for me to maintain my new life. I might resent forcing myself to go and exercise on top of persuading myself to stay within my food intake limits. That’s why I don’t recommend that someone starting a diet add any new exercise to their routine. There’s plenty of time to exercise once you have lost weight, are secure in your new lifestyle, and are living a fulfilling life where you trust yourself and your mind and body are working together.
I do believe that exercise moves my weight around, hopefully from my fat areas to my muscles. I won’t know for sure until I am a bit thinner! I may have lost 43 pounds since I started in January, but I still have 77 to go. That distorts the body a bit. But the important point is that I am using my exercise to help regulate my food intake. I like to swim, so I don’t have to persuade myself to do it. Instead, I take the calories that I burned and use them to keep myself happy with my diet. I’m always extra hungry on exercise day, and for good reason. The calculation goes: I burned 600 calories exercising, so I will allow myself 500 extra. It’s win-win. I get to swim. I get extra calories to play with, and I get extra hungry, which increases my enjoyment of my food. Last, I go into deficit another 100 calories as a bonus. (600 burned minus 500 eaten = 100.) So this is a great compromise that is working for me.
-The Doctor