Word.
We’ve established that diets and I go
way back, right? And how, when I started exercising in 2010 it was definitely
about health and fitness and not really about weight loss?
By April 2010 I had been regularly
exercising for a few months and was starting to feel good. I wasn’t winning any
triathlons or anything, but I was able to keep up a steady quick pace on my
park walks and Jillian’s directives to do pushups no longer filled me with
terror. Again, I didn’t even own a scale at that point, but my clothes were
starting to get a littler looser (“loose,” “not cutting off circulation,” same
thing) and in the back of my head that little voice was starting to pipe up:
What if I lost weight? What if I got thin?
This time there was a competing voice
that tempered me somewhat. This voice wasn’t negative, it was pragmatic. It
reminded me that life was long and I had time to go slowly. It reviewed all
my previous diets and weight loss attempts and came up with things that worked
and things that didn’t. This little voice also pointed out that, as much as I’d tried this and
that over the years, I’d never really given plain old calorie counting a try.
Calorie counting is, in theory,
simple (I say “in theory” because I feel like I now have an advanced degree in
calorie counting, and could go on at length on about it. I don’t want you to
drool on your keyboard, so I won’t). You track what you eat and try to create a
calorie deficit, eating fewer calories than your body needs to sustain its
activity level. In turn your body is forced to “burn” stored energy for fuel
and that creates weight loss. With me so far? Now, to this day, I have no idea why I
never tried it before. Because it seemed old fashioned and lacked glamour? Because
I didn’t perceive it as easy? Because I didn’t really get it? In any case, I
was ready to try it now. It had two big advantages: it was free (yay!) and no
foods were off limits as long I as tracked them.
There are tons of free calorie
counting websites out there, and I don’t remember how I ended up using the one
that I did, but I signed up at Livestrong and started using it. At first, I ate
pretty much the way I usually did – no dramatic changes – and started observing
what left me hungry and what didn’t. Which foods were worth the calorie splurge
and which ones weren’t. I started realizing
that I could eat a heckuva lot of vegetables for relatively few calories, and
that eggs in the morning filled me up forever while my Eggo Nutri-grain waffles
– even though they didn’t have a lot of calories – made me hungry a couple of
hours later.
The weirdest thing about all of this?
It was fun. I know I’m strange in many ways, but trust me when I say that calorie
counting is fun for me in the same way that puzzles, or Sudoku, or crosswords
are fun for others. It’s interesting to look at my calorie budget for the day
and figure out how I’m going to spend it.
I started counting calories April 21,
2010 and have never looked back.
Next up: Learning to use the scale as
A tool, not THE tool.
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