Saturday, August 20, 2011

Draggin' In The Wind

No matter what diet you try, you have to give yourself time to get used to it and perhaps even tweak it where necessary.

I am only just learning this. If you’ve ever done a diet program, then you know either the book or the Nazi in charge tells you precisely how and/or what to eat to make this work for you. And you are not to stray from the program! Or it won’t work!

Luckily, I opted for my own brand of diet, which is just calorie counting. And I can alter it as I choose. And it looks like I might have to.

Yesterday was my second day on the reduced calorie plan. I also had Zumba last night. About a song and a half into the class I realized that I simply had no energy. It was all I could do to make my feet move when they were supposed to. About halfway through the class I realized why I was being so sluggish. I had not eaten enough. It hit me quite out of nowhere. It was then that I started thinking that I might have to add to my calorie bank.

Yesterday my food intake consisted of four strawberries and a half cup of cottage cheese for breakfast, two cups of chicken tortilla soup for lunch minus the tortilla (so really just chicken soup), a pear, 6 cubes of cheese, and two 90-calorie cereal bars. Sounds like a lot, right? It seems like a lot just to write. Well, it’s not! It wasn’t enough to get me through Zumba at my usual pace, which kinda bums me out. Once I got home, it took what seemed like forever, but I finally ate again before bed. Chicken tortilla soup, but this time with tortillas! I treated myself to a Sprite as well. After logging in my exercise, I had almost as many calories to consume as I had started the day with. After supper, I still had almost 700 calories left to eat. So I had a bag of M&Ms. Hey, it was within my calorie constraints! Don’t judge me!

Even though I had earned back almost 600 calories I really didn’t want them, which actually put me at a serious calorie deficit. To me it sounds like a good thing, but even I know that it’s not. MyFitnessPal asks you how many pounds you want to lose and then from there it tells you how many calories a day you are allowed. It gave me 1200. Twelve hundred calories is the absolute lowest amount of calories you can eat daily and not be considered starving, and I’m quoting a doctor on this one. Any less and your body is going to hang on to whatever you are putting into it on the assumption that you are starving.

Twelve hundred calories gives me the energy to, y’know, live and stuff, but it does not give me energy to work out at a pace that I like, which is fast. I did wonder, however, if maybe it was just an off day. So I decided to keep going at this pace for two weeks, maybe even as long as the one month mark and see how I feel. If I am still dragging during workouts, I’ll have to tack on about 300 calories more.

The only other time I used the 1200 calorie plan was in the spring of 2010. It did virtually nothing and I felt like crap. Of course, then I found out that I was three months pregnant so that might have had something to do with it. So I am calling do-over.

I plan to go to my Mom’s and weigh tonight and get my initial start weight and measurements.

Then it is so on!

1 comment:

  1. I was under the assumption that I'd be worse off if I was under my 1200 calorie limit, but then I found this article (Which is from a blog, but the lady does research/validate a great amount of it.) Thought you might find it interesting. I know it put me somewhat at ease.

    http://fattyfightsback.blogspot.com/2009/03/mtyhbusters-starvation-mode.html

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