My daily posts have a main purpose – to help me control my food intake. I do this by keeping a food journal every day. I enter what I eat, right after I eat it. I don’t remember everything if I try to do it all late at night. Another part of entering food into the journal is to pay attention how much I am eating. If I only wrote in the journal at night, I might find out I had overeaten during the day. (I am actually writing a post now about how to recover from a bad diet day.) Then it’s too late!
Don’t play the game of trying to force yourself to eat less tomorrow to make up for today, either. That day is done and you can’t get it back. Look towards the future and try again tomorrow. Tomorrow, be aware of how much you are eating and enter it into your journal right away.
My food intake and calorie count
Breakfast – leftover sesame chicken (150); mini apple pie (210); 26 grams Sarris chocolate (140)
- 500 calories
Lunch – 6 x pizza slices (100)
- 600 calories
Dinner – BLT wrap (200); Moroccan lamb ragout (350)
- 550 calories
Snacking – tea with half and half (80)
- 80 calories
Total for the day: 1730 calories (limit 1800 + 500 bonus from swimming, total 2300)
The limits of calorie cutting
It’s not too hard to reduce your total calories to a certain point, but then it gets to be more and more work for less and less reward. No matter what you do, it takes 3500 calories per week to lose a pound of weight. After a while, there just aren’t many left to cut.
As usual, this week I have been swimming twice. Normally on those days I am extra hungry and feel free to reward that a bit. This week I wasn’t really extra hungry so didn’t eat more – I stayed below 1800 calories per day all week. Does this mean I will have lost an extra pound this week? Ha, no. My swim routine takes about 600 calories, so you could say I was down 1200 calories this week from my usual. That’s only 1/3 pound! I’m not sure I would even notice that on my scale. Looked at another way, I have reduced my intake to 1800 calories per day. If I tried to bring the total down to 1200 calories per day, I would probably be hungry all the time and would be down….a pound (600 x 7 days in the week = 4200) for the week. One pound is not worth the price of being hungry all the time. I don’t have that kind of willpower.
Losing weight seems really slow. But I am not going to complain about “only” losing 2-3 pounds per week. That’s fantastic and will get me to my target weight. Don’t get in the way of being fantastic.
-The Doctor