As I promised in my last post I would share more about how I am counting calories. I knew that using the Wii Fit Plus alone would not get me to where I want to be. This is when I decided that I would focus on how many calories I was consuming on a daily basis. I searched online for a few different free calorie counting websites and found Calorie Count to be really effective. If you get a second you should really check it out.
If you don't have the time to check it out, let me tell you a little bit of what it offers. It has a huge data base of foods and a search engine that allows you to find practically any food you eat. On the slim chance you can't find it in their data base they allow you to enter the nutritional information. I've only had to do this about 3-4 times. It also breaks down your calories by meal (breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, other) and gives you an overall total as well. When the day is over you can click on the "analysis" button and it will tell you if you on target or off target for each of the nutritonal areas. It also provides you with a circle graph, breaking down the three major nutrional areas: Fats, Carbohydrates, and Proteins. The Final piece that I like is that it gives you a line graph showing you your daily caloric intake. There are several other things it does and a lot of other information you can get if you would like.
I'll end with telling more about the goals I have set for caloric intake each day and my feelings about counting calories. I originally wanted to shoot for 2000 calories a day. Needless to say, I have yet to reach 2000 calories or less. For the first couple of weeks I was averaging about 3000 calories. Just recently I have been able to get down closer to an average of 2300 calories. I attribute that to my body adjusting to eating less. I gotta tell you....the first couple weeks I constantly felt hungry. I compared it to someone who stops smoking, "cold turkey".
You could ask 5 different people and get five different opinions about the most important thing to monitor. Some say it's carbs, some say it's fat, some say it's proteins. My opinion is that what you focus on depends on the person and what their specific needs are. For me, I was just eating WAY to much! A moment of transparency here; sometimes I would go several nights in a row eating 1/2 pint and sometimes a pint of ice cream. Somtimes before I ate the ice cream I would have some chips and queso. In a sense, I got into a "food routine". It was easy for me to snack throughout the day because I am always on the go. Snacks during the day aren't necessarly the worst thing in the world; it's more about what the snacks are.
I can't be sure, but knowing what I know now I wouldn't be surprised if I was consuming an upwards of 10,000 calories a day. I can barely bring myself to say that. Needless to say, Going from that to 2000-3000 calories a day the weight has initially come off pretty quickly. I know this will slow as I lose more, but that's okay.
My intial two-week goal was to lose 10 pounds. I reached it in 1 1/2 weeks and dropped to 306. The last two times I have weighed in I'm not sure how accurate they were so I'll be sure to report again once I feel I get an accurate weight. Part of the reason it's not been accurate is because my lovely daughter (Alexandria-18 months) took off one of the four corner risers from the balance board and decided to hide it on us. I have ordered a replacement from Amazon and it should be here in a couple of days.
Preview of my Next Post: I will be sharing some of the changes I have made in the foods that I eat. Once I feel that I have caught everyone up to speed, my goal is to just share my daily progress and some images of the things I'm eating.
Hope everyone enjoys this latest post. Talk to you soon!
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