hello all!!!
Ok - calories. Your body burns calories just by existing. According to my little app thingy, Yesterday I needed 2017 calories a day simply to survive - that's calories to make my major organs function, move muscles to breathe, have my heart beat, keep my brain going, the whole lot. If I wanted to stay at my current weight I would need to eat 2843 calories a day. In order to lose weight I need to eat less than the calories it would take to stay at my current weight.
If I wanted to lose 64kg in 347 days I needed to lose (according to my app) 1432 calories from my diet i.e. 2843 calories - 1432 calories = 1423 calories that I could eat yesterday. I can make that calorie loss up by either eating less food, exercising, or a combination of both.
As I lose weight, the calories that I need to exist, and to maintain my weight change. Today my calorie maths looks like this:
2849 calories - 1416 calories = 1423 calories
By eating around 1200 calories a day I am already losing more calories which should mean that I lose weight more quickly. I'm also losing weight faster by exercising.
The biggest thing for me has been keeping a food diary and a close eye on exactly how many calories I've been putting in my body every day. I'm ASTOUNDED!!!
I think maybe the 1200 calorie minimum story comes from the advice about making sure that you get the right nutriets each day to keep your body functioning.
This was a pretty good explaination of the 1200 calorie rule -
http://www.livestrong.com/article/54317 ... se-weight/As far as I can make out, the only reason eating less than 1200 calories hinders the loss of weight is that very low calorie diets (particularly the shakes ones which I have tried MULTIPLE times) are not sustainable (its hard so people give up easily) and almost everyone will put weight on after returning to eating normally (because they haven't learned to control their calories intake whilst eating normal food).
weekends are definitely hard. Particularly because I do most of my socialising around food (meeting friends for brekkie, lunch or dinner). I decided, after advice in a book I read, to treat the menu as a list of ingredients the kitchen has. Instead of having buttered toast, poached eggs, smoked salmon, avocado and hollandaise sauce , and orange juice and a full fat milk latte with sugar (my usual brekkie at the place we went this morning) I asked for 1 piece of toast, two poached eggs, and smoked salmon with no butter and no hollandaise sauce, water to drink and a skinny latte with no sugar. I cleaned the plate and didn't notice the difference in taste between my usual latte and a skinny latte. Strange!
The worst bit was watching everyone else tuck into their usual breakfasts loaded with fetta cheese and avocado and sausages. Ugh (soooo good)
As for takeaways. I've not encountered this challenge yet. I guess I'd just look at the menu and try and pick grilled or oven baked things. Avoid cheese and anything deep fried. Quite a lot of the fast food places are doing healthy option snaks now which is useful. Remember... just because you ordered a meal it doesn't mean you need to eat everything that comes with it (always my mistake - particularly with fries).
Chelsie I think you did really well with you dinner choice last night - particularly in light of everyone else tucking into their usuals!!
F
by lmffph » Fri Jan 06, 2012 9:27 pm 
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but things are settling down now; bit like those pokey fingers you had in your upper elbow Fiona 
