The Other People

A diet is a selection of food that makes other people lose weight.

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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.

Day 25

71.5 kg

Willpower: Sitting next to an open bag of potato chips the entire evening and not eating even a single one of them.

Day 16

These past days certainly haven’t been that suitable for dieting. Weekend was what it was and not much changed on Monday. I usually tend to live like a hermit so on those rare occasions when social life is on offer I have a hard time saying no. So, yesterday, when a friend of mine asked me out for pizza I accepted her invitation. It was not too bad, though. We went to the local pizzeria quite early in the day so I had a chance to adjust my food plan accordingly. Still, eating a pizza surely isn’t the best choice for someone on a diet.

Today will have its challenges as well because I’ll be entertaining a friend later on. Luckily she knows about my new healthy lifestyle and will surely understand if the snacks I choose for us are from the healthier end of the scale.

I’ll do my best to stay on track!

Today’s weight:

74 kg

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.

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.