Monday, November 22, 2010

Weigh-In Number Two!!!

I just do not believe it!  Another 3.5 lbs lost!  It's actually working!  It's working in a tangible, results, I can do this kind of way!  Ironically yesterday was a hard day for me.  I knew that the weigh in was this morning and I was looking forward to it all day yesterday but, at the same time, I was hungry all day yesterday as well.  I would eat something substantial, stand up from the table and it was like there was a trap door in my stomach or something because it would suddenly feel completely empty and start growling at me as though I hadn't eaten in a week.  I really felt the stress of calorie counting yesterday, truly for the first time.  I wanted to eat everything in sight and yet, I didn't want to eat anything at all because nothing sounded good enough to "spend" my calories on.  I was like a kid at a candy store who had only $1 and wanted everything in the store but didn't want to spend her dollar on any one item.  So I just stood there in the middle of the store and looked at the candy, torturing myself.

I ended up going to the Perfect Circle concert with "Temptation" because his buddy decided he didn't want to go at the last minute.  Climbed a few flights of stairs, did a fair amount of walking, spent most of the show standing, then came home and did some Wii Fit.

I just can't believe I'm seeing another loss again this week.  I really thought I was going to stall out or something.  It's like a miracle is happening right now because I really never thought that I could lose weight by trying ... every time I've ever lost weight it was just something that happened as a result of other events in my life.  I can be thin AND have a happy relationship ... amazing!

Food:
4 glasses of water
1 cup of coffee with creamer
1 cheese croissant
1 organic red pear
1 can Progresso Light Beef Pot Roast
1/2 cup leftover lasagna (crammed lasagna in a measuring cup.)
1/2 cup leftover spaghetti (crammed spaghetti in too.  I'm awesome.)
1 Hershey's 100 calorie snack pac
2 slices white american cheese
2.5 cups buffalo popcorn
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Daily Caloric Intake: 1,541

Exercise:
90 stomach crunches
30 leg lifts (side) each leg
30 leg lifts (front) each leg
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Daily Caloric Burn: 219

(p.s. Posting early today because I am too excited about the loss to wait!!!)

5 comments:

  1. That's awesome!!!!!!
    :D


    When you have days like Sunday, you may want to consider a "body confusion"-technique of exercising really hard and simultaneously eating a LOT more than you typically do.

    A word of caution: you can't actually do this frequently and continue to lose weight -- that's because you can never exercise enough to work-off any amount of food you choose to eat. (I used to didn't believe this until I read about the "candy bar" example: a typical candy bar has maybe 200 calories... you can eat it in what, no more than 5 minutes??? Me, actually I can eat it in about 30 seconds. But it takes about 20-30minutes of exercise to burn that same 200 calories doing fairly intense exercise like boxing on a punching bag or doing vigorous swimming or circuit training. So you can't actually out-exercise an unrestricted dieat).

    But the basic gist of it is that you take a day like that and agree to eat, say, 500 calories more than you typically do... you can probably do this 1x/week and get away with it. On that same day you commit to doing more exercise than you normally do, as well... though it does NOT need to be so much to actually burn that entire 500 calories off... maybe 30minutes extra of fairly intense stuff (like to burn the 200 calories I mentioned above).

    The basic idea is that your body is going along for a week or two on a low-calorie diet and is losing weight but now (as in your case yesterday) is signaling to you that it is STARVING -- that is, your body is starting to think that you are actually suffering from famine (it doesn't know any better). The body's natural response to famine is to lower your metabolism in an effort to store more of the limited intake it's getting -- a big reason that a lot of people "plateau" while dieting. "Body confusion"-techniques are attempts to SPIKE your body's metabolic-reaction in order to prevent it from dropping. This technique will help to spike it in 2 ways: increased exercise (exercise forces your metabolism to be increased for a short duration) and increased food-intake (which helps your body to stop signaling that it is starving).

    This is only one way to achieve this sort of confusion, a lot of other techniques exist. There is no risk of true weight-gain on this method because those 500 extra calories, even if you didn't do the extra exercise don't amount to even an extra 1/4 of a pound -- plus, the extra food-intake causes a metabolic-boost, so you wouldn't even store the full 500 since some amount of that would be needed just for the extra metabolic-action. Mix in the exercise and you've consumed less than 300 extra. Figure in the metabolic-reaction of the confusion, and the figure is much, much less. Then consider the possible plateau you may have avoided and you are likely actually ahead of the game.

    On a day when you are "starving" -- and possibly going to cave -- this technique might actually propel you into a stronger week than if you had just stayed-the-course.

    Just a thought.
    But if decide to do it, be sure you don't do it too often -- or too much (don't eat 1000 extra calories, for example). It's meant to be an infrequent and slight deviation from an otherwise standard-routine.

    (your brother)

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  2. This makes total sense and I actually considered it last night but then the concert came around and diverted my attention. They mention this sometimes on CalorieCount.com, the site I'm using for tracking calories and you and mom have both mentioned this to me as well.

    I think you're absolutely right. There is no reason that I can't eat an extra 500 calories during the earlier part of the day to make my body think "oh ... ok there's food coming in, the crisis has ended" and then bust my hiney right before bed to burn the calories, jump start my metabolism and then, because I'm to bed right after the work-out, sleep through my body's eminent complaints after the fact. The complaints are something I'm sure you're aware of, every time you work out as soon as you get done your body says "hey, I want those 300 calories back, feed me!", even if you eat right before the work out. I've experienced this too many times to count which I why I like working out at night when I can get away with it. Going to sleep before my stomach has a chance to complain is like chewing someone out over the phone and then hanging up before they can respond. My morning my body has probably "gotten over it", plus I can give it a bran muffin as a peace offering. :)

    I also don't think that giving myself one day to add extra calories, as long as, like you said, it's not 1,000 extra calories, is probably better for the rest of my health anyway. Where I'm still taking a sub-par multi-vitamin because I'm too cheap to throw them away and buy good ones, I could drop 500 calories in fruits and veggies which means I'm also dropping a crap load of good, natural, vitamins into my system at the same time.

    Since this method reminds me of your caveman diet I am going to track my "bad days" on the white-board that's on my freezer. That way if I find myself standing in front of the fridge with the door open I can look at the list right in front of my face and say "Oh ... it's been a week since my last "bad day". Guess my body needs to be put back in line with "cave-man" day."

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  3. Congrats! This means that you are awesome! If you keep going through the hard parts, you will see success.

    (I sounded like a fortune cookie right there didn't I?)

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  4. You always had a habit of sounding like a fortune cookie from time to time though so it's expected. :)

    My favorite Ki-ism is still: "Ignorance is not bliss, merely irresponsibility." I quote that one all the time.

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  5. keep up the good work! sometimes "hunger" is just our minds playing tricks on us. Often happens just before a weigh in or when we get close to a mini goal. Good job ignoring it.

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