Banking calories, surprised nurse and Weigh In

So today is Thursday, April 21, 2011.

I decided that instead of boring you every single day, I would only do it once a week.  Preferably on my weigh in day.  However, as I state at the end of all my videos, you should always contact a physician before starting any weight loss plan.  Really, I believe that it's only necessary if you have not been active for a year or more.  Anyway, even though I am I decided to see my doctor about it anyway and set the appointment about three weeks ago.  My appointment was yesterday and went really well.  She told me that my plan of exercising and eating healthy rather than just less is a great idea.  Duh!  Right?!  It's not like I thought she would say anything negative about it but I was amazed at how excited she was about it.  But she wasn't the only one that seemed surprised about it.  While I was with the nurse and she was checking my stats, she asked me all the usual question but when she asked me why I was there, I said, "I'm starting a weight loss plan."  She happily kept doing what she was doing and casual said, "Which plan?"  I said, "Um.  Diet and exercise."  She turned to me so quickly and with a look that said something like, "You crazy lady, nobody does that!"  I smiled and she said, "Really?  I thought you might be getting the stomach band..." Then she looked thoughtful and added, "But maybe it's better, I know a couple people who got it and their organs are failing."  It was my turn to be surprised about that but I just uttered, "Wow."

To be honest, when I got the reactions from the nurse and the doctor, I felt quite proud of myself.  I know that many people go this route but from the way they reacted to me, I feel that not many people who frequent my doctor's office do.  I feel like it gave me more power.  I've even decided that I'm going to make some signs with encouraging or rather, motivating, words or statements and place them on the wall that I face while being on the computer most of the day.  When I get them up, I will take a picture and let you know what each of them says.

Ok, now onto banking calories.  Often people will try to save their calories, so instead of eating throughout the day when they know they have an event going on, they will not eat.  This is so that later they can eat whatever they want.  But that is not healthy.  Neither is over eating one day and then trying to eat less or just not eat the next day(s) to make up for the extra calories.  It's really important for your body that it not only gets the proper nutrition but also that it doesn't feel starved.  Even though we are not starving, when you do not eat, your body stores the food when you finally do eat.  Because it feels that it is not sure when its next meal is going to be.  Of course, when you do this, you also run the risk of over eating, even absentmindedly over eating to compensate for not only the calories your missing but the for the calories that your body thinks it might miss later.  Now, I've said before that I am not a nutritionist but anyone who has read health articles or talks to their nutritionist, will know these things.

On a personal note, I think that if you're craving something, you should have it.  But make sure to buy it in a single serving, or share it with someone so that you only get one serving.  If those options are unavailable, take only the one serving and put the rest away and save it for later.  When I was growing up, we didn't know when the next meal was going to take place or what the next meal was going to be, so like hungry wolves (but not so lean), we'd gulp down the food, fearing that if there were any left overs, someone else might beat us to it.  It's really important and sometimes even I forget, that no matter what the food is, this will not be the last time that I will be able to eat it.  Even if someone does "beat" me to it, I will be able to buy it again.

Oh, I was just about to leave but remembered I did not give my stats.

Worked out: 11 hours this week.

Calorie intake avg: 2,666

Neck: 18       Gained: .5 inch

Arms: 24       Gained: 2.5 inches

Bust: 50         Lost: 1 inch

Waist: 48.5    Lost: 1.5 inches

Hips: 54.5     Lost: 0

Thighs: 29.5  Lost: .5 inch

Calves: 20.5  Gained: 1 inch

Weight: 326.4  Gained: 1lb

As you can see, my inches and weight fluctuated interestingly.  I still find it strange when I gain weight but lose inches, especially when I lose inches in only some areas and gain in others.

This week I will remind myself that 1lb equals about 3,500 calories.  Good luck to everyone in this next week and please wish me luck as well. ^_^

Four meals and one snack

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Exercise – 20 minutes of cleaning

Cals burned – 159

Today I didn’t think about cleaning much, I just cleaned, and talked to friends online.  The few times I did, I just pushed it out because I wanted to talk to people.  Tomorrow I’ll get back on track, I certainly did not mean to go off but I don’t think it’s that big of deal.  I don’t feel guilty about it, which does slightly surprise me.

Cals – 1,750

Grade – A-

Breakfast – Salad (spinach, lettuce, blue cheese, and croutons), medium banana, 8oz orange juice.

Snack – Activia Light yogurt

Lunch – Healthy Choice beef pot roast

Snack – (if you want to call it that) oatmeal with ¼ cup 2% milk and 3 packets of sugar, a peanut butter and jam sandwich with whole wheat bread, and a ¾ cup 2% milk

Dinner – Healthy Choice sesame glazed chicken

I’m so freaking excited because today was my first A- and that really means a lot to me.  My sodium was still too high but it was lower than normal, my fiber was just barely too low and my potassium was almost 70% which makes it my highest so far!  I’m feeling very proud of myself. ^_^  Today I didn’t really feel hungry at all and I’m very glad about that, but that also means that I missed my snack of apples and peanut butter.  That would have kept my grade an A- but my fiber would have been in the green and my potassium would have been just barely in the yellow.  So I’m feeling quite good today and I am planning tomorrow to be a great day as well but we’ll see how that goes.  As for how my meals went, since I wasn’t feeling hungry, my calories were low and I don’t feel comfortable yet with eating less than 1600 calories, which is why, my day turned into four meals and one snack.

Thanks for reading!

Week 1 - Day 9 - Weigh in Time!

April 12, 2011

Exercise – 84 minutes

Calories burned – 1,796

Today was a very good and easy day.  I worked out moderately on my arms for 44 minutes and vigorously on my legs for 40 minutes.  I feel like I’m doing much better on my legs and am very happy that even though I cannot do vigorous workouts with my arms, I can last for a longer period of time, when going at it moderately.

Cals – 2,010

Nutrition results – B (Caloriecount.com)

Breakfast – ½ Blueberry bagel with Weight Watchers cream cheese, a medium banana, and glass of orange juice.

Snack – Smart pop kettle corn.

Lunch – Hamburger helper crunchy taco

Snack – String cheese and jello

Dinner – Spaghetti with ground beef and a glass of 2% milk

Snack – Activia Light yogurt

After my breakfast, I felt hungry very quickly but forced myself to wait two hours before I had my kettle corn because I was afraid that if I ate my kettle corn too soon, I would just want more food.  It helped and I was able to hold off till lunch.  I feel like I shouldn’t have added meat to my spaghetti but it’s been a few months since we ate it that way and it sounded good at the time.  I didn’t go over my calories by much and really, had I not drunk the two Pepsi’s that I forgot to mention above, I wouldn’t have gone over at all.

Today is also my weigh in day.  Here’s the results:

Weight: 326.2 Lost 1lb

Neck: 17.5 Lost 1 inch

Arms: 21.5 Lost 1.5 inches

Bust: 51 Lost 1 inch

Waist: 50 Lost 1 inch

Hips: 54.5 Gained 3 inches

Thighs: 30 Gained .5 inches

Calves: 19.5 Lost 1.5 inches

Over all it was a good week.  I could not believe that I gained 3 inches on my hips though.  I measured twice just to be sure.  I hope that I don’t gain anymore on them but we’ll just have to see next week.

Thanks for reading and take care!

Calorie Counting Made Easy

Caloriecount.com is a really cool and free site that allows you to keep track of your diet.  It’s very easy to navigate and they have a lot of support on the site as well as peer support by allowing you to write your own diet journals for private or to be read and forums for social interaction.

How it works is you sign up (obviously) and while you’re signing up, you enter your stats, such as height, weight, your activity throughout the day.  Then it tells you how overweight you are (if you are) and what weight you should be for the information you gave and how long it should take for you to reach the goal.  They decide it the time based on if you lose at a healthy average of 1-2 pounds a week.  If you’re like me and morbidly obese, it will tell you how many calories a day you must eat to maintain your weight, as well as how much to reach your goal.  I don’t know why it does that.  My brother signed up and it only gave him a plan but he’s only a little bit overweight.

What I really like about the site is that when you log your food, it tracks the nutrients in your day so you can see if you’re really eating as healthy as you think you are.  The first day I tracked my food, I got a D+ but I’ve been doing better ever since.  They also have a database/search engine on their site, it’s pretty good but I still find myself logging in about half of what I eat.  A drawback is that if you enter your own food information, you need to make sure that you put in the weight or ounces as well as any vitamins/nutrients the food has or it won’t be graded properly.  Not only that but even if you go back to edit the food, it only edits it in your meal plan of the day, you’ll have to re-enter everything and save it.  I’ve had to do that quite often and I wasn’t happy about it.

It also helps you track how many calories you are burning.  You can look up the exercise that you did or enter the information yourself.  To enter it yourself, you’ll need to know how many calories you burned, just like entering your own food, you need to know all of the information.  That won’t be hard, if you’re exercise machines are all high tech and stuff.  I just use their database to choose the closest thing to what type of exercise I did.

Of course, it also helps you track your weight and you can look at a graph and see how you are progressing.  Although, I’ve been on my diet for almost two weeks now, I haven’t yet been on this site long enough to show you an example of the graph.

Another plus, is that if you are unsure about anything on the nutrition report, you can hover over the bar that you do not understand and it will explain to you what it means and gives you a link where you can find more information on it.  They also have “Ask Mary” and Mary is a nutritionist that can answer any questions you may have.  But you’ll want to look through and see if it’s already been answered before sending her a message. ^_^

There is so much more to this site and you’ll just have to check it out to see what else they have.  I hope you like it and find it as useful as I do.

Caloriecount