The Beginning...

Hello, welcome to my new blog! I know there are a million and one websites devoted to losing weight, but I wanted to give my own personal take on the subject for any of my family and friends who are interested. At the end of April I decided it was finally time that I got serious about losing my excess weight. The weight has literally been a drag on my whole life and I felt like it was holding me back from doing the things I wanted to do, but I also knew I wasn't very good at dieting or exercising. So I came up with a plan that I felt like I could follow which was based on sound science and if need be could be practiced the rest of my life. So I started April 29, 2009 and have now lost almost 30 lbs (almost two dress sizes). So that was about 17 weeks ago, totalling a loss of about 1.75 lbs a week. So I know that pounds aren't flying off, but I'm making respectable (sensible) progress and I don't feel like I'm risking my health in any way.

So how did I come up with my plan and what is the basis of it? Well I recently had read a little blurb in a magazine citing a study that found that people who kept a food journal were more apt to lose weight than those who didn't (this article is a good little read, check it out: http://www.webmd.com/diet/news/20080708/keeping-food-diary-helps-lose-weight).
Ok, I thought, I can do that, I'll write down everything I eat. I didn't think it would be fun or neccessarily convenient, but I thought it was doable. Then I decided to take it a step further, I would also write down the number of calories for each thing I ate in a day and tally the calories up at the end of the day. Further I would try to keep my calories within a certain range. I chose to keep my daily caloric intake between 1600 and 2000 calories (of course my calories have usually ended up being closer to the 2000 end and sometimes over!).

Next, how did I arrive at those numbers? Well to lose weight I knew that I had to take in less calories than I burned in a day. So I went to this website, http://www.freedieting.com/tools/calorie_calculator.htm (I really like this website, it helped me a lot in developing my plan) which helped me figure out how many calories a person of my size and activity level generally burns in a day. So for me to maintain that current weight that I was at I could eat between 2381 and 2078 calories/day, but to have fat loss I would need to eat between 1905 and 1760 calories/day. The first number reflects if I worked out 3 days a week, the second number is if I got little to no excercise that week. Of course excercising more would allow me to eat more calories. I've decided the key here is to start with something very managable, that is why I chose 2000 calories as my upperlimit. I knew I could do that without feeling like I was starving all the time. I would encourage you to not go below 1500 calories for any length of time. This is extreme dieting and you won't be able to keep it up and may have negative side effects.

So that was the basis of the plan, but of course I have learned a lot along the way that I plan to share in later posts. But if you think this is something that you would like to start doing I encourage you to figure out how many calories you need a day at the website above and then get a notebook and start writing. Consistency is the key. Best of luck!