Calories. The bane of my existence. I’m currently reading “The EatingWell Diet” for review; it’s a nutritionist’s guide to changing your eating habits long-term so that you can get healthy and stay healthy. One of the early things you do is calculate the number of calories you have to consume to maintain your current weight, decide whether you want to try to lose one or two pounds per week, and thus cut 500 or 1000 calories from that maintenance amount, as long as you don’t dip below 1200 calories per day. Of course at my height (did I mention I’m really short?) I had to round up to 1200 calories, naturally.
The book has you start out just tracking what you currently eat, because it’s really handy to see how much you actually take in, and just knowing that can often lead you to start changing your eating habits. I have to admit, I feel quite a bit of dismay to discover that, even eating healthy foods, it’s really easy to hit 1200 calories by early afternoon. Of course, there’s a reason for this—if you aren’t regularly exercising, you’re almost guaranteed to gain weight. And by exercising you can, of course, increase the number of calories you’re allowed to have each day. I’ll give it this—it gives one quite a bit of incentive to get out and get that exercise when you see those totals.
I am still glad that I read about the South Beach Diet, even though long-term it didn’t work out; it taught me a lot about the various types of fats and grains, and although my calorie intake still sucks, it did increase the quality of those calories, which is a first step in the right direction.
Anyway, back to reading that book with me. Coming soon: that review; the start of a new and unusual world-building article series from our business partner; and more T-shirt designs—I’m due to get a copy of Photoshop delivered today!
Leave a Reply