So this morning, I weighed myself in for the first time for our friendly competition, and I’ve lost 1.4% of my body weight since my original August 1st weigh in! I know this isn’t a big number – but this will be a slow, steady process. I have to have some patience if I want to do this right. Here’s the problem: I have absolutely ZERO patience.
Losing weight is a fairly easy concept, IN THEORY. If you burn more calories doing whatever you do in a normal day than you take in, you lose weight. Working out helps burn the calories and jack up the metabolism – so if I take in less and I burn more, I’ll weight less over time. In order to track the calories I am taking in, I downloaded an app on the Iphone called MyFitnessPal. As long as I log in every single item I consume as well as the amount of water I drink, I’ll know how much fuel I’m taken in all day. Here’s yesterday’s log as an example: August 2nd’s Caloric Intake
MyFitnessPal asks you a bunch of questions about your weight loss goals, and then estimates the number of calories you should consume in a day in order to safely lose weight in a set period of time. So it estimated that I should take in 2,300 calories a day in order to slowly and safely drop to the weight that I want over a set time frame. In yesterday’s example, I took in slightly less than my daily budgeted amount – so that’s a good thing. All things being equal, I should have lost a tiny bit of weight yesterday, according to the Apple App Gods.
Here’s where the catch comes in: I’m training for a few endurance events, which complicates the math. If I only take in the calories on my list that you just saw, I’d have 2,200 calories in me to drive my human engine all day long. Now let’s take into consideration the workout I performed this morning: 45 minutes of running burned 550 calories. Then 50 minutes of indoor cycling (a spin class) burned another 650. So basically I used 1200 of my 2,200 calories to get me through those two sessions. This means that my body needs to run the remainder of the day on 1,000 calories. So needless to say, I’ll need to move the calorie goal posts a bit – but I also need to be disciplined…..so like I said at the outset of this campaign: this is going to sucketh.
