Sodium woes

I hadn´t really thought I wouldn´t be called out to duty over the weekend. Actually, I ended up spending the better part of both days bound up in business-related stuff, so much that I barely found time to plop in a few loads of laundry. What also went by the wayside was the good intentions about cooking I´d had for the weekend.
While that isn´t that dramatic as far as food waste is concerned, thanks to my big freezer where the ingredients for the meals I had planned are now slumbering, the long and short of it was that I had even less time for cooking than I usually have during the week.
Which meant taking out the wok for some stir-fried vegetables and pork on Saturday, and oven-baked veggies with halloumi cheese on Sunday. Both tasty, low-carb, too, but unfortunately both rather salty and therefore causing water retention. Which means another red triangle in my weight graph. As such things go, it´s a small one, and as I know I didn´t go too far over my calories, I´m confident to see another green area (a loss) again soon. Still, it is annoying.
But then again, what I am aiming for isn´t perfection. What I aim for is getting to goal, even if it does take some patience.
On average, I have, since I started this, lost 0.26 kilograms (about half a pound) a week. There might be people out there who regularly lose more. But I´ll bet most of them have a lot more to lose than I ever had. Underfeeding by 3500 calories is a lot easier if your exisiting body burns 5000 of them a day just for the basal metabolism. My body, as time and experimentation have shown, burns about 1500. So, if a 5000-calorie-a-day person halves his intake, there´ll be a 2500 cal/day deficit. If I halve my intake, I have to meet my body´s nutritional needs out of a 750 calorie budget, and my daily deficit would also be just 750 calories.
To get rid of that pound of fat, I´d thus take four and a half days, while the 5000-calories-a-day person would lose one every 1.4 days.
Except I would, at that going rate, be going into starvation mode and end up malnourished on top of it (not enough nutritients in that little amount of food). I´m not talking about too little calories, mind you, but about things like vitamins, minerals, and essential amino acids, of which the body needs a certain amount for proper function. So, for the long run, my average loss will be less because I won´t starve myself.
And thus I refuse to compare myself to (or allow myself to be chided by) anybody who started out with more than twice the kilos I have to lose till goal. Such a person will of course be able from the start to reach a higher average weekly loss. Let them show the numbers they produce when they have gotten as close to goal as I was when I started, and thus are likely having a similar basal metabolic rate. Then, and only then, will the results be comparable. Before that, it´s clearly a case of comparing apples and...let´s say pumpkins? No offense meant, just a comparison of size. And those are different, no matter what The Great Pumpkin might claim.


Julia