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 Posted: Sun Jan 31, 2010 2:23 pm
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Posted: Sun Jan 31, 2010 2:25 pm
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◄◄◄THE PLAN►►►
I will achieve my weight loss through calorie manipulation, diet change, and regular running.
Because it's physically impossible for me to run 20 solid minutes at 6.0mph once an hour for 3 hours, I've been working on a manageable routine that yields nearly the same results.
3 sessions of 25 minutes once an hour for 3 hours.
5 minutes of running at 5.6mph, 5 of walking at 3.0mph, another 5 of running, another 5 of walking, and 5 more of running.
For years now I've just been eating whenever I feel like it. My body is confused all the time and it expects food at random intervals. Within the past week I've been trying to eat around the same times every day, to anticipate my hunger as much to regulate my digestive system, but I always have liquids handy. I've also limited myself to 1 diet soda a day.
Breakfast at 11:00am, lunch at 4:00pm, dinner at 9:00pm, snack at 2:00am.
In addition, 1 multivitamin, 1 diet soda somewhere in between, 1 health shake somewhere in between, and lots of water.
I've determined that my BMR in Optimum Range is between 1300 and 1350 calories. For my current weight my BRM is around 1500. I've decided to factor in a BMR of 1400 every day until I'm back to where I need to be. This way, I'm losing a little more than expected until I cross over into my Optimum Range. With my 3 workout sessions I'll be burning around 600 additional calories. Digestive activity will be another 200. As long as I complete my exercise I'll be burning roughly 2200 calories every day. I'd like to create a deficit of 1000 calories daily, which leaves me with up to 1200 to consume. It's easy enough to plan my meals with calorie restrictions, especially since many things which are better for me have much less fat and calorie content than fast food or microwaveable junk. More fresh fruits and veggies and grains and chicken, less taco bell, ice cream, pizza, etc.
1400BMR + 600WRK + 200D
2200 total calories to burn, 1200 to eat, 1000 contributed to deficit.
Based on these elements I should be losing 7000 to 8400 calories per week. That's 2 to 2.4 pounds a week. At this rate it will take me 16 to 20 weeks to lose all the weight. The thought of being back to my Optimum Range in just 4 to 5 months makes me ridiculously happy. Especially considering that I hit overweight and have just kept climbing for years.
If I can just follow through with this it really isn't that hard.
STAY WITH THE PLAN, SELF.
I'm about to start a new full-time job being a housekeeper at the Marriott hotel in my area. When that happens I will absolutely adjust my routine if need be, as well as factor in the energy I'll be expending to do my job. When that happens I will edit this post.
I will weigh myself once a week, on the same day at the same time, every time.
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Essentials // Plan // History // Entries
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Posted: Sun Jan 31, 2010 2:39 pm
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◄◄◄HISTORY►►►
My story is not a terribly engaging one. I was 14 when I became body conscious. I was a little overweight when I bought my first scale. Before then I'd had no real opinions about my weight, physique, or eating habits. My metabolism was so great I used to be able to eat as much of whatever I wanted without consequence. When I hit puberty that changed, and I started gradually putting on the pounds. The day I bought the scale I weighed 124 lbs. I believe it was the shock of seeing such a large number that led me to the mirror, where I made my very first critical self-assessment. Thus, I was never able to shake the number from my mind, nor forget about all the imperfections I had seen in my flesh, about my shape, or the way I was suddenly ashamed to be living with such a body. I can still see them now, though with much greater insight.
For the next 9 days I exercised like a fiend. I already walked to and from school. It was a 20 minute journey one-way if I did so quickly. I always carried a backpack filled with all my textbooks because I hated lockers, so it probably weighed 30ish pounds. When I came home I started running through the house for 10 minutes an hour, every hour, for 6 hours, because I remembered something from health class the previous year about needing an hour of exercise to lose weight. I did 300 sit ups every day. I worked out with my dad's weight bench to train all the muscles in my legs, arms, and chest, performing once every hour after the run. I didn't factor in the walking, and I had no idea how weight loss worked, or the role calories played in it, only that if one consumed a lot of food, not all of it would exit the body. I started limiting my food to small portions, cutting out extra trips to the kitchen, and restricting my meal time to the evening. I hadn't eaten lunch at school since 7th grade so it was already a habit of mine to eat a days' worth of food between the time I got home and the time I went to bed. It wasn't much of a stretch to remove snacks and the late lunch. My only real issue was the awful struggle to overcome severe asthma, which I was born with, and I will never be rid of. But the exercise made my lungs strong for the first time in my life.
Within those 9 days I lost 7 pounds. I kept 5 of it off. It was most elating. I continued for another week with this reckless routine and lost another 5, bringing my total weight to 112lbs. It was incredible how much better I looked and felt in my clothes. I was also proud of how much I could accomplish in a day when balancing my studies with exercise and sleep.
For the better part of the next 3 years I bounced back and forth between 110lbs and 115lbs. I exercised sporadically and my eating habits frequently changed. I ate more after a heavy workout and drank a significant quantity of water, but I still didn't understand how much of an impact exercise had on my appetite and thirst. Eventually I just cut everything but the running out of the daily exercise, because I especially enjoyed how powerful and energized it made me feel, and I noticed it kept the number on the scale in check rather well by itself. I became an endurance runner. I started to educate myself about fitness, and tried to adopt a regular healthy diet. After a year of running through the house, my mother was so fed up with it she bought me a treadmill. I started running 5 miles a day. Having never known how far I was traveling in the house, it was nice to see the exact distance I traveled during a workout. I set the speed at 5mph and broke the hour up into 20 minutes over 3 hours. Gradually I began to increase both my speed and my time, until I'd trained myself up to 30 minute runs of 6mph every hour for 3 hours. A few months of steady running brought my weight to a constant 107lbs.
When I was 16 I suffered an extensive injury to the left ankle and was unable to run for months. By the time the limb was able to handle the strain, it was weaker than it had ever been, and I had to build my routine from the bottom up again. A few months after that my family moved to an apartment complex that wouldn't let me keep the treadmill. It was stored in a garage unit not attached to the apartment. I got a residential membership to the clubhouse attached to the office so I could use the treadmills there, but so many others worked out all the time It was very hard for me to slip in before someone else came along.
Over the next 2 years my physical stamina dwindled. My senior year I was battling so much school work I barely had time for anything else, let alone an intense running program. I stopped paying attention to my weight. I was constantly unhappy with it, even though for most of that year I stayed between 110 and 115lbs. I'd lost muscle mass and gained body fat so I looked heavier than I really was. I was uncomfortable with myself all the time. The day I graduated I was 119lbs. I remember being horrified at the thought of having pictures taken. My face had begun to round out, I had lovehandles in the making, my thighs rubbed together with every step, and new stretchmarks blossomed over my skin.
Just before I graduated my best friend moved in. She lived with my family through the summer, to the end of September. We had a very negative affect on each others' diets. We both had a great love of sweet things, and snacking when we were bored. When one of us got up for food, we'd bring the other back some. By the time I'd gotten my first job interview in mid-September I was 126lbs. The difference between then and when I'd first discovered my weight was that I understood the way my body worked, the way it looked at optimum weight, where the weight tended to accumulate, and why I'd gained the weight. I also understood what I had to do to lose it, but after months of being lazy and complacent, I couldn't successfully force myself into a running routine, or let go of the unhealthy foods I loved to much on all the time.
The girl moved out, I went to work, I got my own place, and over the next 7 months I went from 126lbs to 106lbs. Two months after this bad things happened with my roommate and I moved back home. I enrolled in the local college full-time.
Over my 19th summer I went from 106lbs to 112lbs.
In January, only a few weeks after my second trimester had begun, I started taking birth control to stop my periods. They'd always been long, painful and very unpleasant to deal with. Ever since they'd started I was regularly missing school to lay in bed with a heating pad and midol in an attempt to ease the intense muscle spasms. I'd powered through the when I was working, but it was difficult, and the strength of the cramps often left me with pulled abdominal muscles at the end of the night. Over the next 6 months the pill made me gain 14 pounds. In April my family moved again, this time into a house, and I was able to set up my treadmill again. I fell in love with running once more. In August, after doing everything I possibly could to shed the weight, I took myself off the pill. Aside from an instance where it gave me a 23 day period, I absolutely knew it was the reason for the weight gain. I performed an experiment where for exactly one week I ate nothing but light salads twice a day, fixed myself a health shake, and drank water. By the end of the week I'd managed to gain another pound, despite running 6 miles every single day of it.
Things just spiraled out of control from there. I stopped caring about exercise, and about what I ate, but I still cared about how I looked. Since then, I have been slowly gaining weight, to the average of about 3 pounds a month that I just don't work off, until I find myself where I am today at over 150 pounds.
I have so many stretch marks I can't even count them. Believe me, I've tried. Sometimes I wake up and I can hardly believe the state I've allowed my body to fall into. I barely run, because I have to start from the beginning again, and if I do this I have to acknowledge just how out of shape I am. How much I've let myself down. All the same, I need to start somewhere. In recent weeks I've found that even losing 5 pounds is not satisfying. It should be thrilling, but with such a large amount of poundage to shed, it seems insignificant. To return to my healthy body I need to lose about 40lbs. To get into the career of my choice I need to lose 30 of that for sure, just to be at the maximum weight allowed for my height and build. I need to lose it. I have to, for myself, my physical and mental well being, and for my future job. I've barely glanced at my reflection in a year because I don't want to look at what I've become. I don't touch myself because I can easily feel that my shape is what it shouldn't be. I feel very uncomfortable when my lover touches me, even when it's a simple hug, because even though he says he doesn't care how I look and never will, I can't help but feel he secretly does, and that when he feels the imperfections of my body, it repels him.
Today is the day I begin to fight to make my future as long and successful as possible.
**************************************
Essentials // Plan // History // Entries |
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Posted: Sun Jan 31, 2010 3:52 pm
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Posted: Sun Jan 31, 2010 3:54 pm
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Posted: Fri Feb 05, 2010 2:47 pm
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