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.

Sounds Like My Day

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

Rita Rudner

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:

Day 8

My weight loss has started to stabilize a bit and during the past two days I’ve actually witnessed some weight gain. I’m not sure whether it’s a result of eating too little in the beginning of the diet but I have, once again, decided to change my approach. During the past couple of days I’ve been blindly staring at the numbers, trying to fill my daily calorie need and that has actually made me feel as if I’m doing nothing but eating all day long. Also, the fact that I’ve been trying to eat protein-rich products that I usually avoid may have had an effect on my overall wellbeing. So, today I’m starting to listen to my body again and will only eat when I’m hungry – no matter what the numbers are telling me.

Today’s weight:

75 kg

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.