So I decided as part of this food revamping thing to get back to the basics. Figure out exactly what’s going on with my caloric intake and what I should be eating, etc. I’m telling you, that Jillian thing threw me for a loop–I kept thinking: “Yeah maybe I should be eating 1200 calories a day”. And while I’m certainly capable of eating 1200 calories for like 3-4 days it’s just not something that’s sustainable for me. Inevitably a birthday or a…hmm…Fourth of July holiday weekend comes up I eat around 2000 calories it breaks my “dieting” mentality and I end up eating at that calorie range for a couple weeks until something knocks me back on track.

So while I’m crunching those numbers I decide to play around with the whole thing and change a couple things here and there and do some long term predictions. You know what’s weird? If I ate 1900 calories a day and did no exercise I would gain one pound every 2.2 months. :O That’s crazy! I’m pretty sure there are WEEKS when I eat 1900-2200 calories everyday! No wonder I haven’t been losing any weight. For me–at no exercise–1843 calories is maintenance. If I ate 1600 calories and burned 200 calories in exercise each day? I would lose one pound every 8 days. So doable! 200 calories is only 2 miles. I could walk that each day!

So for my meal planning I’m going to shoot for eating 1500-1600 calories a day if I’m working out. If I’m not working out I’ll drop to around 1400 calories. Still sustainable, but making up for a day of not working out. If I burn more than 200 calories I think I may start to eat those calories back in. I want the weight I’m losing to come from fat not muscle.

And–I know I know–I said I was only going to do one thing at a time. Focus on food and not worry about exercise. But I kind of forgot that I signed up for the Army 10 miler again this year. (Why do I do this to myself? I don’t know…) If I want to be properly trained up–instead of just going out and running it cold like I did last year–I need to build up to the mileage slowly.  So for one month I’m going to be doing the last couple weeks of a 5k training schedule then I’ll rest for 1 week, and then I’ll do a half marathon training schedule for 12 weeks. See my training schedule for July below.

I don’t think this will be too bad. The most I do is 3 miles which isn’t too bad so I shouldn’t get all freaked out by trying to juggle these both at once. I am going to keep up my kick boxing on Wed. And I’m thinking of doing a 6 week boot camp on Saturdays so I may end up flopping Saturday and Sunday depending. This is doable.

Next up? Gathering some good recipes to fit into my calorie plans and create shopping lists.

First off: holy crap check out this weight loss transformation. Absolutely incredible. They don’t even look like the same person. The amount of work that must have had to go into a transformation like that is staggering. It really puts into perspective for me what I need to do to lose 15 pounds.

Next check out this post from Jillian Michaels on her Facebook. Always wondered how the biggest loser contestants lose so much weight each “week”?

What do Losing It families eat: I basically put them the Master Your Metabolism diet. Then I set the women’s calories at 1200 intake & men’s cal intake at 1600 daily. I have the guys burning 4,500 cals a day and the women burning 3,500 cals a day.

Umm…what? Do you think the “burning 3500″ includes normal body functions? Like your basal metabolic rate? Even so I would still have to burn around 2000 calories per day while only eating 1200 calories. That would be like running 20 miles every day! If it DOESN’T include BMR I’d have to run 35 miles a day! Holy crap. Maybe I’ll wear my HRM one day to see how many calories I’m really burning per day.

Reading something like that makes me feel really antsy. Like I’m not doing enough. It’s part of my “all-or-nothing” mindset when it comes to losing weight. I think a lot of it is because I want results NOW, and when I don’t get them I think: well, duh, it’s because I’m not eating 1200 calories and running 6 miles a day I should do that. And then I try it for a day or two, burn out, give up, fling myself face first into a pie and they cycle starts all over again.

I’ve decided to tackle this weight loss in 5 pound chunks. I’m going to set my Weight Bot app to a 5 pound loss, I’ll maintain that for a week, and then reset for another 5 pound loss. I hope by looking at small manageable goals I won’t freak myself and be more realistic about the whole process.

Ok this post?

Best sales tool ever. Immediately after reading it I went onto Amazon and bought one. And yes–I know. I do a pretty terrible job of update this blog. But I WISH I were better. Doesn’t that count? And look stickers! Stickers! Haha.

Basically I’m feeling a little blah–I need a little push. I think buying myself fitness related stuff (workout gear, a fitness magazine, etc) is a pretty easy way to motivate. Bad news is that Amazon says it won’t ship until July. Ugh.

In foodie related news I took my boyfriend to City Zen for dinner on Saturday. We did the 6 course tasting menu and with the wine pairing. OMG amazing. Highlights of the evening:

• Strawberry and rosemary champagne cocktail
• Roasted Eggplant Ravioli
• Butter Poached Lobster with Foie Gras
• Parker House Rolls
• Free champagne toast because it was our anniversary!
• Anniversary card signed by the staff including the head chef!
• Chocolate Pretzel dessert–the dessert last time didn’t impress me at all, but this time? I was ready to lick the plate to get the last remnants of the salty sweet deliciousness into my mouth. Fancy restaurant be damned!
• We took a limo home because they couldn’t get us a cab fast enough and a limo was hanging out and going to go back to our area anyway. He charged us regular cab fare!

We had an amazing amazing time, and the food was all WORTH it which is a good reminder to me when I’m mindlessly eating toast slathered in cream cheese because I’m lazy and don’t feel like cooking.

I’ve been going strong since last Thursday. I kick boxed Saturday, I ran yesterday and I plan on doing something tonight. Goal weight here I come!

I missed doing this last week–sorry Biz!

I think part of the reason I did miss out on my report is secreted away in my past post. Can you spot it?

Yes–I started out gung ho and ready to do this, and then as soon as I had a tough work week where I had to work 10 hour days every day (and I just finished doing a couple hours of work) I let everything fall apart. I culminated on Wed. (after I missed my kickboxing work out) when I decided to open a bottle of wine that my BFs mom gave us for our anniversary and ended up drinking half of it myself and then nibbling on whatever I found in the house! Chocolate chips, pretzels, frozen yogurt. Ugh. I woke up the next morning determined not to get knocked out of this thing so early.

I’ve been back on my calories the last few days, and I’ve worked out twice since then (run, and a kick boxing workout).

The one thing I’ve decided to tweak is my eating. The last time I lost a bunch of weight I did it by eating when I was hungry and watching my calories when I did it. What this boiled down to was not eating breakfast a lot of mornings. I’m not a morning person, and frankly I’m not usually hungry until around 10:30 when–in the past–I would eat a light snack, yogurt or something–then I’d eat lunch late, around 2 or 3 and then I’d not be hungry when I got home (enabling me to work out) and eat dinner late. breakfast was non-existant, lunch was pretty light, and then dinner I’d want something more substantial.

The second time I tried to lose weight (this is still the second time but I’ve been trying for about 3 years now. :B ) I was trying to eat a lot healthier. Even though the calories were good my first attempt, the food wasn’t always. Dinner could still be pizza, and there’d be a fair amount of nights where I was out at the bar and eating fast food. Breakfast, lunch and snacks, were usually pretty healthy. But then I started worrying about anti-oxidents and eating enough veggies and getting my vitamins and minerals from food and not from vitamins. So this time around I did a lot of research and based on that started forcing myself to eat breakfast. But the thing is that the reason they tell you to do it (kick-start your metabolism and not bingeing later to make up for being hungry) don’t seem to apply to me. Well maybe the metabolism one does, I can’t tell I guess. But the bingeing thing never happened to me. I wasn’t skipping breakfast because I was trying to cut those calories out. I made up for them by eating a bigger dinner later and a light snack around mid-morning. And now my forcing myself to eat breakfast, I find myself still wanting that mid-morning snack and the bigger dinner.

So as an experiment I’m going to try going back to what I know worked. Not forcing myself to eat breakfast and eating when I’m hungry. At least this time I’m still worried about veggies and vitamins and minerals (oh my!).

I’ll report back next week to see how it’s going.

Ok guys…I’m posting to you from rock bottom. I’ve had a ridiculousweek at work, my sister had her 21st birthday and today is my 6 year anniversary. I celebrated with half a glass of wine and what ever the hell I felt like eating (real celebration is this weekend where we’re going to a super fancy restaurant that has 7 courses and a wine pairing with each one!). Tomorrow I start a fresh because each day is new–with no mistakes in it. I will make allowances for this weekend since the reservations are already made and I’ve been looking forward to it, but I’ll eat sparingly on Saturday and exercise. And start again.

Aaaaaaaannd….GO!

HAHAHAHA: That was supposed to read half a bottle of wine! His mom boought it for us…it’s good!

So I was about to post a short but sweet note saying that I was struggling. I had an egg and cheese sandwich on wheat toast this morning, and a greek salad for lunch, but this work day is getting to me. I want to go downstairs to the deli in our building and buy chips and cookies and drown my sorrows.

But then I saw a comment from Biz–I don’t know why but my spam box always thinks comments from Biz are spam! This comment was from yesterday, but perhaps the universe knew I would need it today. Her comment pointed out that I’m so close to the 150s. I am! And I don’t want to do anything to mess that up.

Eating chips and cookies wouldn’t help my stress at work anyway. Maybe it would mask the feelings for a while, but I’m going to have to deal with the work at some point.

Thanks Biz!

Oh gosh, oh gosh. I’m already running into issues with this challenge. I’m in severe crunch time at work which means 12 hour days in my case. This also means dinner provided by the company (pretty much always pizza or fast food), no time to work out, and exhaustion when I do get home.

It started yesterday–I worked until 8PM and then ate two slices of papa johns pepperoni and a bread stick–sending me 400 calories over my daily goal. (Although that means 1800 calories which I guess isn’t too awful.) But today I’m probably going to have to work just as late and my kick boxing class is at 6PM. I didn’t even bother to pack my gym bag. I’m hoping maybe if I make it to my apartment by 7:30 that I can change, hop in my car, and make the 8PM class. We’ll see.

I am still logging my food though, and I did run home from work on Monday which torched 500 calories.

Unfortunately if I don’t make this kick boxing class I might miss the whole week–I’m going to my grandparent’s 60th wedding anniversary on Saturday! I guess I could go Sunday.

I’ll get through this and figure it out…

Woo! Week one in the bag! I met all of my goals except kick boxing. I had a hair appt on Saturday and it conflicted with my second class. As to my calories you can see bellow that I logged them all but also that I was over my goal for the week. My goal per day is 1375 so going over by 245 for he week means I ate 1410 calories per day on average. Not bad at all.

This week I burned a total of 1770 calories through exercise! That’s half a pound of fat burned! Considering my BMR is around 1675 and I ate around 1410 calories that means I created a deficit of 1875 calories from my diet.

That’s a grand total of 3645 calories slashed from last week. Considering a pound of fat is 3500 calories hat means I burned up a bit more than a pound. (of course that doesn’t mean all the calories came from stored fat but it’s good to see I’m on he right track!)

Also I weighed in at 161.2 this morning which means a loss of .8 pounds so far. That means I’ve got 3 days to lose .2 pounds if I want to keep my goal of losing a pound every 10 days.

Now I’ve just got to get my head in the game for this second week. I’m starting off strong with some sweet potato pancakes topped with yogurt, honey and fresh blueberries. Lunch is 3oz of salmon, some coconut rice and beans left over from dinner 3 nights ago, and cherry tomatoes. I’ve gotta come up with a good snack later too because I’m going to run home tonight!

Good luck this week fellow challengers!

Oh no! My first challenge! I did NOT get up this morning to run like I said I would. I’ve been SO tired lately and I know it’s because I’ve kicked up my workouts. I just couldn’t get out of bed this morning. But that leaves me with a dilemma. I’m going to the Nats game tonight which means beer and stadium food. But it also means going home late on a Friday. I just know that we’ll get home from the game and I’ll be tired and not want to run.

I’m going to compromise with myself and say that I only need to run 2 miles tonight after the game. I should be able to handle that.

My calories have been spot on and I even worked in a beer and a hot dog tonight for dinner so I should be good to go.