As Close To Impossible As It Gets

Last night, while I was staying awake, listening to my neighbor throw a party for probably absolutely no reason whatsoever, I bumped into this website.

One hundred push ups. There’s something that seems so impossible for me to reach that I absolutely have to give it a try. I’m all in all quite strong and even muscular in away, but for some reason I completely lack the kind of muscle power that push ups require. But it’s not like I’m going to let that stop me. No way.

So, today I started working towards my impossible goal. I decided that I best fit into level one and did five sets of push ups – totaling to 12 push ups. Twelve! That’s like nothing. Especially since I cheated enormously due to the fact that there was a cat standing under my belly. And the fact that I. Just. Could. Not. Do. It.

But it will get easier. Eventually. At least I’m going to keep trying. The program seems easy enough for me to follow. And there’s even a simple tool for logging those push ups.

I’ll keep you posted!

Emotional Calories

“If hunger is not the problem, then eating is not the solution”

I must apologize for being such a lazy blogger lately. I guess I could blame many things. The emotional turmoil in my life this past week. My busy schedule. The weather. Anything and everything. Yet in all honesty I’ve just been too lazy to post. My weight loss project has found a nice balance. I’ve started to figure out my daily energy need on my own without that much help from various calorie counters. My weight keeps going down and I feel like I’m getting fit. In other words, everything is going to the direction I wish it to go – and on a nice and steady pace. That leaves me with nothing major to report.

But I’m still here. Continuously trying to figure out what the best lifestyle choices for me are. The diet profile questionnaire on Calorie Count gave me a little more insight into things. According to my profile I’m an emotional eater and as such use food to affect my mood.

“emotional eaters should plan their meals ahead, and always have a clear idea how much they want to consume”

I guess my food diary has saved me from numerous “emotional calories” during these past four weeks. I hope I can keep it up in the future as well!

Go ahead and find out your own diet profile. I’d love to know what kind of obstacles other people have on their path to healthier diet.

Comfortable Fit

“Your ideal size is the size that feels the best, at which you have the most energy, the best health, and the highest self-confidence and self-esteem.”

Some time ago I bumped into an article titled Choosing Your Ideal Size on the FamilyEducation website. The article had plenty of good points but the one I found particularly motivating was the importance of clothing. You know, taking that age old pair of jeans out of your closet and realizing that for the first time since the last ice age you actually fit into them.

“Scales scientifically measure your specific gravity in relationship to the earth. That’s all.”

I had been blindly staring at the number on my scale for weeks but on Friday I had a very thorough laundry day that left me with practically nothing to wear until my clothes would dry. So, I ventured into the depths of my closet. To those uncharted regions that contain a huge collection of depressing clothes from days gone by.

“Clothing sizes are an imprecise but highly effective guide to measuring your weight-loss success.”

Much to my surprise I came to notice that many of those clothes that I already thought I’d gotten rid of actually fit. Fit! Comfortably even.

Now I’m even more motivated to continue with my diet!

Doomed?

“But I am avoiding the all-or-nothing attitude. Diets are doomed to fail from the Monday we finally start them (again). If we truly want to change who we are and what we look like when it comes to weight, we have to change how we deal with food in our lives.”

I was browsing through the blogosphere again the other day and found a really cleverly written article by Jody Genessy.

Thanks to Run the cat for pointing me to that inspiring piece of writing!

Before | After

I was browsing through various blogs the other day and eventually ended up on The Journey There. Through that site I found exactly what I had been missing – a weight loss simulator that let me create a lifelike simulation of my own weight loss goal:

Before | After

There’s still a long way to go but I must admit that the picture on the right does look quite motivating!

Hacker’s Diet

“How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition”

During my diet I have tested several online services that have been created to help people with their weight loss projects. One rather unique system is the so called Hacker’s diet. Their website offers a simple weight logging sheet which is then turned into a nice little chart stating your actual weight loss as well as the recent trend in your weight loss project. I’ll be giving the site a closer look in the future but right now I just want to post my Hacker’s Diet Badge in order to celebrate finishing my first week of dieting:

Body Mass Index

In one of my earlier posts I used reverse BMI to determine my ideal weight. The so called body mass index can also be used as an interesting tool to keep track with weight loss.

So, in order to avoid getting overly bored with kilograms, I’ve decided to start posting regular updates on my BMI as well. I’ll be using the simple BMI Calculator I found on MyFitnessPal.com.

This is where I was on day 1:

Now, on day 7, my body mass index has already gone down to 27.3.

Dear Diary

Getting some sort of approximation of my daily energy need was quite easy. The next step for me was to determine what kind of an energy amount 1612.7 calories actually is.

In order to make it a bit clearer to myself I set up a food diary on MyFitnessPal.com:

I’ve always loved numbers so counting all those calories, carbs etc was a real joy to me. Unfortunately I quickly became to notice that my diet wasn’t quite what it should be:

Day 1

An obvious problem was that I was taking my diet a bit too seriously. I set myself a new goal of eating only 1200 calories per day which was supposed to help me lose almost one kilo every week. That would be quite enough for me but still I found myself starving myself to death by eating only about 600 calories on the first day.

Eating that little was quite easy for me so I decided to take that as a starting point. On the second day I raised my calorie intake to approximately 750 calories and decided to keep adding a little bit of food to my diet each passing day hoping that that would prevent my body from getting into starvation mode.

Whether this will work in the long run is for me to find out.

Not That I’m Counting But..

I was a math nerd in my previous life and as a result I occasionally find myself falling in love with numbers, graphs and statistics. That’s why I have managed to turn my dieting into maths as well.

My starting weight

76.6 kg

Timeframe

From October 13th to December 31st

1612.7

I have always been prone to eat what feels right. And by “what feels right” I mean chocolate. Unfortunately, now that my lifestyle has changed into a less active one I have been forced to change my habits. I can no longer consider a Snickers bar to be a suitable breakfast. Drastic changes are in order.

But exactly how much do I need to eat? I know that I tend to overeat because my blood sugar has a habit of falling to my ankles way before I’ve used up all the energy I’ve consumed. As a result I end up snacking all sorts of candy bars, sugary drinks etc throughout the day. But I’ve decided to put the issue of blood sugar aside for now and try to concentrate on my calorie intake instead. Once again, a seemingly simple task, provided that I had any idea what my daily calorie need is. Luckily, help is not far away.

About.com:Nutrition offers hordes of information for anyone interested in changing their diet. One nifty tool is their calorie counter. After inserting some basic information about myself I got the following result:

“If you reduce your current caloric intake to 1612.7 calories per day you will lose one pound per week without exercise”

That is what I call a good starting point.