If I were to apply Norma's yardstick to my own situation, I'd have to call myself a resident of Grand Central station.
A link in a blog she mentioned led me to discover that there is indeed an app to go with the Hacker's diet aka Physics diet weight recording scheme I use. It's called Fat Watch, and it has even more ways to analyze the data than the other one. Most of all, it has retina display quality graphics, with colour contrasting backgrounds for the different BMI stages so the curve goes into the red as soon as one hits obesity, and you can set up a goal which also is displayed. As I am a very visually-oriented person, that kind of thing is highly motivating for me and well worth the five euros it cost.
So, I spent part of the weekend manually transferring the data back to August 2010 ( that's when my weight finally started going down) into the new app. Seeing the resulting curve for the last year was sobering, as was reading the evaluation that went with it. Namely, if my weight keeps developing in the direction it did last year, or even in the last months, I can kiss my dream goal good bye. I would actually regain.
Not that I did not have the data before, but seeing it spelled out for me to see and read like that is driving home just how deep I'd gone into denial about what was happening.
What I had convinced myself was maintaining did actually turn out to be a slow regain. Slow enough to be barely noticeable from day to day, but adding up to, per today, seven and a half pounds that have crept back from my lowest point last May. 3.4 kilograms. Gained.
Definitely not the thirteen kilos I had wanted to lose in that time.
The bummer is that I have, during that year, not been overeating like I used to do. I haven't binged on cookies, nor did I bury myself in bucketloads of vanilla pudding or nuts. Statistically, I ate just 32 calories a day more than I should have in order to really maintain.
I also ate, statistically, 233 calories more than I should have to reach my hoped-for loss of half a pound a week.
Which adds up to 265 calories a day, on average, which I should either not have consumed or have burnt with excercise.
265 calories I did, once more, not realize I was ingesting too much.
If I still want to get to goal by my next birthday, that means that, having squandered another three months regaining, I now need to reduce my intake by some three hundred calories a day, if possible, plus a safety margin.
I'm glad that this extremely long winter seems to be on the way out. Cheaper veggies than in winter and a chance to get back into my walking routine without immediate danger of catching pneumonia.
And the daily reminder of that app to keep me on my toes.
I must never believe I could ever play this by ear. If I stop watching my every step and bite, this is what happens. I will probably never become a fitness devotee like Norma (I stand in awe of how she finds the time and strength with a partner, two kids, two dogs, a business, a job and visits with family and friends). I am, apart the time constraints of a job with completely unpredictable hours, completely exhausted most days even without kids, pets or friends to deal with. So what I must tweak is my intake.
Three hundred- plus calories off what I already did perceive as a reduced intake. Bummer.
At the risk of Yoda telling me differently, all I can do at this point is try.
Julia
No comments:
Post a Comment