Slow and Steady...

Photo Courtesy Shirl (Aunt Owwee), licensed CC-BY-SA

Another week in the books, another 1.1 pounds lost, for a total of 46 pounds down altogether.  The overall trend for the past month is very positive, with a generally negative slope, as shown below.

This week was novel because I was trying to eat more, rather than less.  In the past (most notably in 2000 when I first worked out, but also in recent months), I would eat one meal a day, usually in the mid-afternoon.  It did not matter what I ate, the calorie totals would usually be under 1,000 for the day - - sometimes significantly less.  Part of this was a misguided attempt to cut calories, but more of it was simple laziness and lack of effort on my part.  I generally did not eat breakfast (I preferred to sleep), and I never had the ingredients for a proper lunch in my house. 

Anyone who knows anything about weight loss will know that this amount of a calorie deficit puts your body into serious hoarding mode.  And let me tell you, my body was made for hoarding, what with its hip pouches [grin]. 

Since downloading the MyFitnessPal app, however, I have been exposed to a deep pool of information about healthy eating, and have surrounded myself with like-minded peers who are all walking the same path as me.  The biggest take-away thus far?  I need to eat more, rather than less in order to lose weight. 

My previous calorie intake was not even covering my basal metabolic rate, so it was no surprise that my body reacted like it was starving.  I certainly wasn't covering the calories expended by my exercise, when I should have been covering my total daily energy expenditure (TDEE), which takes into account my basal metabolic rate plus exercise.  

This past week I have been consciously trying to eat around 1900-2000 calories a day, roughly double what I was consuming before.  And the results are positive, as you can see - another 1.1 pounds down, but without any of the sense of deprivation that I previously experienced.  

My sugars have not been as normal as I would like them to be (only one normal reading this week), but the non-normal values have been trending lower, which is a positive result.  Whereas when I first started tracking my fasting blood sugars would be running between 6.3-6.8 mmol/L, now they are typically running between 5.7 and 6.3 mmol/L.  These figures are not normal, but they are definitely moving in the right direction.