Getting a Grip

I was thinking about my last post, and I sounded so out of control...and whiny! To be honest, I think I wanted to not eat. Since, for whatever unknown reason, I haven't been hungry, I was gonna ride that horse into the ground. I was gonna go with the flow. I was going to lose as much weight as possible as quickly as possible. As much as I protested that I couldn't eat (boo hoo, poor me), I realized I could have if I'd really wanted to. Talk about being a drama queen...I need to get over myself.

At some point, I decided...The control is mine. I can choose to starve myself, binge and purge, compulsively overeat or UNDEReat….or NOT. The fact is, I can also choose to eat healthy.

So that's what I've been doing. I've been making myself eat every few hours. For some reason I'm still not hungry, but I know I need to eat. So today I took fruit, yogurt, some crackers, and a protein bar to work…total calories about 800. And I made sure it was all gone by the end of the day.

I felt good. I felt as if I had control back, in a good way. Not in a crazy "controlling" way, which is different than a "controlled" way. Now I'm back gradually working toward my goal of getting to 163 (or 162 or something in that range. I'll see how I feel when I get there).

But I've never really just tried to lose weight in a healthy, logical way, so I wasn't sure how to go about it.

I was looking at a few other blogs, and someone mentioned BMR, Basal Metabolic Rate. It's just a numerical formula you use to find out how many calories you use, and then you eat less than that and expend more calories in order to lose weight. Here's a simple graph that explains the process...
Got it? Uh...Yeah, sure...anyway...

Since you use energy no matter what you're doing, even when sleeping, your BMR is the number of calories you'd burn if you stayed in bed all day. I found an on line BMR calculator and found out my BMR is 1460, which is not much! But the calculator said that if you work out 3-5 times a week (moderately active), you can multiply your BMR by 1.55.

So, if I keep up regular workouts, my new BMR is 2263 (1460 x 1.55)

After what I ate today, along with dinner and a snack tonight, I've eaten about 1,800 calories. 2263 - 1800 = 463 calories under my metabolic rate. 463 x 7 = 3241 per week.

Since a pound is about 3,500 calories, at this rate, I would lose a pound about every week. Considering that weekends are a bit more lenient, it may take me 10 days to 2 weeks to lose one pound. Which is a perfect time frame. Not too fast, not too slow.

It's amazing to me that after all these years, and all these diets, it comes down to this. Eat less, work out more, lose weight. It's a revelation!