So, what’s the plan?

There are a lot of diet plans out there, but I decided to choose the simplest one:  count calories and get some exercise to burn extra calories.  The reason I chose this method is simple:  counting calories always works.  You can count carbs or fat or whatever else, and this may give good results because in limiting the intake of those nutrients, you will probably limit calories as well.  But ultimately, your body weight depends solely on caloric intake, nothing else.  You could eat bacon cheeseburgers every day and still lose weight, just as long as that was all you ate once or twice a day.  (Of course, that’s no way to actually approach a well-rounded diet, but I’m just saying it would be possible, even with all the fat that would come with such a diet.)  So, counting calories is the one sure-fire way to get where I want to go, and since my main problem is overeating anyway, I figured it also made the most sense in making a lifestyle change with regards to my eating habits.

Calories are simply units of energy that your body uses for all its daily functions.  When you consume more calories than you use, your body turns the excess calories into fat for storage.  That way, if you ever have a deficit of calories, your body can use the calories stored in your fat in order to continue functioning.  Does this sound familiar?  You eat a lot, and fat builds up.  You stop eating, and fat goes down.  The key is to reduce caloric intake to the point that your body is using fat stores for energy, but not to make yourself so hungry that your body actually goes into “starvation mode”, where it reduces your metabolism to try and reserve your fat stores.  Basically, you need to continue eating, but shave enough off your calorie intake that your body continues to burn fat.  More on those details in another post; I think the biology behind all of this is actually quite fascinating.

I’m using a free iPhone app called Lose It! to track my calories and exercise.  It’s a terrific app that will also be the topic of a future post.  Basically, it lets me keep track of my daily weight, input my daily food intake, input my exercise, and calculates my calorie budget by the day and by the week.  3500 calories equals about 1 pound of body weight, so if you want to lose 1 pound, all you have to do is burn 3500 calories.  That means, in order to lose 1 pound per week, you need to eat 500 fewer calories per day than what your body burns.  If your body maintains a constant weight at 3000 calories per day, then if you shave that to 2500 calories per day, you will lose one pound in one week (7 days x 500 calories = 3500 calories/week).  Lose It! tracks all of this math for you, and calculates your daily calorie budget according to your height, weight, age and how quickly you want to lose the weight.  It will only allow you to calculate up to a loss of 2 pounds per week, as this is the maximum amount deemed safe by most health professionals.  Great app, and as I said, I’ll do a full review of it in a near future post.

So anyway, this all amounts to:  eat less, exercise more.  And keep strict track of what I’m eating and how much I’m exercising, so I’m not just guessing.  The results are good so far:  I started at 251 pounds, and today, nearly 4 weeks later, I weighed in at 237.2.  That’s actually a bit faster than expected, but my body is adjusting to a new kind of diet and will probably settle down in time.

Things I’m not doing:  trying to eat drastically different foods and burn myself out by excessive exercise.  Those are good routes to diet failure.  I’m still eating all the same foods I like to eat, just eating a lot less of them, and making better choices about what to have in between meals.  And I’m choosing to eat leaner foods more often – again, foods I already like, but wasn’t eating enough of.  This ensures I still feel full and not hungry, but that I decrease my calorie intake.  Instead of cheeseburgers, I choose deli sandwiches.  Instead of snacking on chips, I choose to snack on fruits.  Instead of a 16-ounce steak, I have 8 ounces.  The two things I have mostly eliminated from my diet altogether are soda and candy, two calorie killers that I have enjoyed far too fondly in the past.  Once again, I will give more details on many specific choices I’ve made in a future post.