Sounds Like My Day

“I burned sixty calories. That should take care of a peanut I had in 1962.”

Rita Rudner

Weekly Wrap-Up – Exercise, Exercise, Exercise!

It’s week number two and my weight has been going up and down, up and down. Fortunately a bit more down than up – as you can see in the above picture. It’s my weight log from Calorie Count – a service I found through Chronicles of the Battle of Bulge. The blue line is my actual weight; the green one my weight loss trend.

This week has been challenging in many ways and as a result my mood has been on the same roller coaster as my weight. I’ve had some rough days but towards the end of the week things in my personal life started to look more promising. But before jumping optimistically into the hopefully more steady going roller coaster of next week, I’m going to write down a thought or two.

Question of The Week

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:

Weekly Wrap-Up – Initial Feelings

Week 1

Today is day 7 on my diet and that means that it’s time for my first weekly wrap-up. I intend to start a series of posts in which I go through my thoughts, feelings, random notions and the actual numbers related to each passing week.

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.