Mmmm...food....

Hello, dear readers :)  Here I am again and I still have concerns about the progress that I am making in my health goals.  I have really been trying to keep the focus on my physical abilities and how my clothes fit but alas, I still love my scale and want to see smaller numbers each time I step onto it. 

I'm sure it's not a surprise to anyone if I admit that I am an emotional eater.  I love that we even have a term for this!  So anyway, the scale was not moving and I was not seeing any difference in the way I looked or how my clothes fit.  Frustrating.  What do I do when I am stressed and frustrated???  Eat! 

I will give myself credit.  My goal each day has been 1200-1550 calories and over the past week I have consistently had between 1700 and 1950 calories.  I was considerably reserved in my stress-eating compared to previous damage I have done, haha.  And you know what?  I lost a pound :)  So this got me to thinking about the changes I made.  Unfortunately, this is no where near a scientific study and there is no way that I can conclude that eating more calories caused me to lose weight.  It did however cause me to wonder how spark people came up with my caloric goal and whether or not they could be wrong.

So I tried to do some research about the number of calories I should be eating per day.  Almost every site I found talked about BMR or Basal Metabolic Rate.  Esentially, this is how many calories your body would use if you did nothing all day.  My BMR is 1646. 

Next, you multiply your BMR by an "activity factor" which I chose moderately active (1646 * 1.55 = 2551.3 calories).  Now according to this website , you should cut your calories but at least 500 but no more than 1000 calories per day from your BMR for weightloss.  That would put me between 1551 to 2051 calories.  I have gone to several different sites and put in my information;  here are some of my results:  1520 calories, 2023 calories, and 2057 calories.  If you recall, I have been eating only 1200 to 1550 calories :(

So anyway, I'm thinking that maybe I need to bump up the food intake a little bit in order to feed my body appropriately so it doesn't freak out about eating away at the fat reserves.  Maybe I should just try the BOD POD and get the final say so that way??

How do you figure out your caloric needs?

~Andrea

SparkPeople

Good Afternoon!  I hope you are having a great day :)  So in my previous posts, I have talked about counting my calories and many of you have suggested different sites to me.  I have finally decided on Spark People.  It's a little like the Facebook of weight loss.  I have really enjoyed recording my progress on their website.  It's really centered around rewarding positive achievements and creating a social support for your weight loss journey.  So far it's been kind of fun :)

One of the things I like most, is that you can add friends to your profile/page.  You can find people with similar goals and become "weight loss buddies."  I have encouraged my parents to join so we can help each other. 

So far, I have been tracking my food, workouts, and re-posting some of my blogs there.  It's encouraging to see my weight ticker moving towards my goal and my fitness minutes increase with each workout.  I have a bit of a nerd streak that loves to analyze numbers and graphs :)  Here is a link for my page if you want to check it out   my.sparkpeople.com/ACROOKSTON

After all this talk of encouragement, I have to admit that for the past week or so I have been very DIScouraged.  I will confess I have been committing a cardinal sin in weight loss.  I have been weighing myself everyday and it has been reading the same weight now for about two weeks or so.  UGH.

I wouldn't be as discouraged if I felt that I was seeing a difference in the way my clothes fit or the way my body looks.  Maybe the discouragement is clouding my vision and perception.  Maybe not. 

Any suggestions on how to keep my motivation?  Any suggestions on how to break this plateau??

~Andrea