Day four of dark, cloudy weather. Today's version: with rain! Goody. A bonus.
So I got up yesterday morning, weighed myself, and the scale said one forty two.
Holy. Crap.
How did that even happen? I had been holding strong at 140 for weeks now, all through the holidays, in fact. I thought I was safe, I thought I had managed to maintain. But no. I've never, ever weighed this much before.
Where did it come from? Does fat get stored away secretly in the blood stream until it senses that your guard is down and then instantly inflates? My belly is a shape I've never seen before. My face is full and I'm definitely on the way to a second chin. I still manage to fit into my jeans, but not very comfortably, I can tell you.
I'd been thinking for some time that I needed to change something about my diet. Yesterday I got down to brass tacks and began researching. Atkins? Paleo? Weight Watchers or Nutrisystem? I was bewildered. I didn't want to spend a fortune, or well, anything, to be honest.
I didn't want to change my entire diet either, because that would mean changing my entire grocery shopping routine and I have everything down to a science right now. I know what to buy, about how much it will cost me and how many meals I can make out of it. It took a while to get there, I didn't want to start all over again.
Well, long story short, I decided to start figuring out how many calories I need daily. That was eye opening; It turns out less than I thought, once I figured in my age and height and activity level. Though, good news! My BMI is healthy. Yay for me. I still want to fit into my shorts come summer.
Then I found this website where I could calculate the actual calories in each food that I ate. Let's just say that until now I have been completely calorie clueless. I had no idea how fast calories add up. My breakfast, coffee and creamer included, is over four hundred calories.
That's oatmeal, people. Oatmeal with no sugar, made with two percent milk and a teaspoon of sugar free maple flavored syrup. Yikes.
Furthermore, to lose at the incredibly slow rate of one pound per week, I would have to eat only 1,406 calories per day. Actually, the website said to lose slowly, I would only have to eat 1,838 calories. Losing one pound per week was their idea of losing quickly.
I just have been ignorant of the whole process of weight. But I've been learning fast, because it's clear my metabolism has dropped off the cliff of middle age and left me stranded.
The good news is that I've already been eating pretty healthy, just ignorant of calorie content. So all I had to do was use the tools on the handy website, add in all the foods I planned to eat that day, and adjust to get the desired total.
This is not the vogue diet, I know. It's so the seventies to be actually counting calories, instead of points or ordering prepackaged diet foods, or eating like cave men. (Which I think would be kind of cool, except I can't give up dairy.)
But I like the simplicity of just counting. And it's free! Also, if I should ever want to eat, say, an entire bag of Lay's sour cream and onion potato chips, I could. I just would only be able to eat nothing else the entire day... except maybe lettuce. Not that I would do something like that...
