I'm just being brutally honest here. I'm terrible at dieting. Counting calories is actually kind of fun and enlightening. Keeping up with what I eat and counting out exact amounts of certain foods isn't necessarily my problem. Here's the problem (one of them). . . my body is used to eating ~4,000 calories a day and now I've got to keep it right around 2,000. I mean, it's not unusual for me to have 2 Totino's pizzas for dinner. That's over 1,400 calories without drinking a Mt. Dew or 2 glasses of Kool-Aid or sweet tea or whatever. Now that I'm counting I'm realizing that an average meal for me is around 1,000 calories. Quite often it's over 1,000. And I eat when I get hungry. So before this "diet" – it's not really a diet yet, I'm in a research and development phase right now – I would eat at least 3 times a day and snack all throughout the day. And by snack I mean a Fudge Round, or a pack of Skittles. Nothing like an apple, or an orange, or anything resembling a healthy snack.
And now I weigh 200 pounds.
When I get up, I'm hungry. My normal breakfast, I'm realizing, is around 800 calories. And I'm fine with not eating again until around 4:00. Because I'm in a band and can't go to bed at a decent hour, I usually get about 3 hours of sleep at night. So when Addison (my almost 3-year old) takes a nap at noon, I nap with her. EVERY DAY. So I get Austin (my 6-year old) to school around 8:30 and we lay down for a nap around 11:30. We get up from the nap and go pick Austin up from school around 3:00. So my next available time to eat is around 4:00. And since I've only had one meal (breakfast around 9:00), by 4:00, I'm starving. So I'll eat a 1,500 calorie "lunch". Well, my normal bedtime isn't until around 2:00 or 3:00. That's 10-11 hours from the last time I ate. So around midnight (8 hours after my last meal), I'm starving. Keep in mind, my midnight is like a normal person's 7:00. So while Erika eats her dinner around 7:00, my dinner is at midnight. Eating 2-3 hours before I go to bed isn't the problem, obviously. The problem is that I had an 800 calorie breakfast and an over 1,000 calorie lunch so I'm at my limit for the day. 2 meals is my limit.
Again, research and development. . .
So what I'm gonna focus on changing first is the amount of calories I take in with each meal. If I can do a ~700 calorie meal 3 times a day, that would be fine. That leaves no room for snacks though. Dang it! And now by snacks I mean healthy stuff. So my first plan of action is figure out how to eat a meal that's not 1,200 calories. The second thing I'm gonna try to do is burn about 500 a day exercising somehow. Not 500 a day. 500 about 3-5 days a week. If I burn 2,000 calories a week exercising that's about 300/day. That's a Mt. Dew.
I'm done talking for today. I'm not frustrated yet because I've only been doing the calorie counting thing for about a week, but I can already see that's it goes way deeper than the calorie counting. There's something in my brain that's off. If I don't change the way I think about all this, counting the calories will totally get to me and I'll be like everybody else that loses weight then gains it back a year later, or whatever. Maybe my first plan of action should be to change the way I think about it all.
UUUUGGGGHHHH!!!!!!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment