My Diet

On 3/25/2008  I weighed 249.6 Lbs. Since then I have lost over 39 Lbs, averaging about 1/2 a lb a day. This is how and why.

I have never really done diets before, except for a span of a few months when I was on Atkins. This time around I tried the normal lower calorie and exercise approach that has been around since the beginning. I am a very analytical person, I like to know exactly what is happening, and I like knowing what my results are going to be.

With that said, I wanted to know how many calories my body burned, how many it burned when I ran, and how fast i would loose weight. I thought it would be hard, but it actually turned out pretty easy, and suprizingly acurate.

The food plan

Your body burns about 9-10 calories per pound of body weight (so I was burning approx 2400 calories a day). After getting that number, I decided I wanted to try to cut my consumption down to 1200 calories. This means on a normal day, my body would burn 1200 more calories than I was consuming resulting in 1200 calories of weight loss. Since there are 3500 calories in lbs, this would result in the loss of a  pound every 3 days. This is without any exercise.

Adding in the exercise

I have never been someone that could run. I tried to pick it up several times in my life, but whenever I couldn’t jog to the end of the block, I would give up. I had the mentality that you had to job to do any good. I was wrong. I have learned that you burn  about 62 calories per 100 Lbs of body weight per mile (running or walking). At 250 lbs, walking 3 miles burns about 460 calories. Adding in a 3 mile walk bring my daily deficit up to 1660. (about 1/2 a pound a day).

The results

To my surprise, those numbers seemed to hold up. From the start until last Thursday (about 60 days total) I lost 30+ lbs.  In that time span I counted every calorie. I have just recently stopped counting calories, and I feel I have a good grasp on food and how many calories they contain. This experience has truly changed my life. I plan on getting down to 200 Lbs in the next 2 weeks or so, and I plan on never weighing more than 200 Lbs another day of my life.