{"id":673,"date":"2009-03-31T16:29:04","date_gmt":"2009-03-31T16:29:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adjustedreality.com\/blog\/?p=673"},"modified":"2009-03-31T16:29:04","modified_gmt":"2009-03-31T16:29:04","slug":"march-recap-math-is-hard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adjustedreality.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/31\/march-recap-math-is-hard\/","title":{"rendered":"March Recap – Math is Hard"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I had high hopes for this little experiment.\u00a0 I had visions of finding that “sweet spot”, like last year, where I could establish a program where I ate a certain amount of food, exercised a certain amount per week, and reliably lost 1-2 lbs per week.\u00a0 You see, besides the times in the past when I was at a happy weight, this was probably the happiest I felt about weight loss in general.\u00a0 Being stuck chipping away at the last 18 lbs, ounce by ounce, is incredibly frustrating.\u00a0 While I would have told myself a year ago to shut up and die for being angsty about that, but it’s just been such a long quest.\u00a0 I want to see this through to the end.\u00a0 The tunnel keeps getting longer and longer though.\u00a0 18 lbs would have been a little over two months when I first started.\u00a0 A year ago, it would have been reliably about 4 months.\u00a0 Now – who knows?<\/p>\n

I guess the point of my bellyaching is that I really was hoping that this month I would find the magic formula – no, not the “take these magic acai berry pills and become 50 lbs skinnier in 2 weeks” type of magic, but as I said before, the sweet spot.\u00a0 That is, the amount of calories I can eat and not starve myself, and how much I can workout for that calorie intake without overtraining.\u00a0 I know it’s supposed to go down as you lose weight, but for me it almost stayed static from about 235 to 170, and then it become like pulling teeth (though I guess pulling teeth would take off a couple ounces…tee hee).\u00a0 January and February gave me a taste of what it’s like to lose regularly again, but March, oh March – you saw me stall out again like an old hippie’s VW Bus.<\/p>\n

Let’s get down to nitty gritties.\u00a0 The first week, I worked out normally (actually increased it a bit due to birthday indulgence guilt) and counted my calories.\u00a0 The second week I worked out the amount the first week dictated by adding up all my calories and applying the formula I determined at the beginning of the month – 9100 calories (or 1300 per day) was the minimum, and with that, I would do the m\"\"inimum of workouts (3-30 min sessions plus strength and yoga twice).\u00a0 My normal calorie intake was 10200, and I would do my normal workouts at that point (4 a week sessions with about 3.5 hours cardio, strength, and yoga).\u00a0 For each 100 calories over 10200, I would add 7 minutes of intense cardio (running, DDR, or the arc trainer) or 15 minutes of relaxed cardio (walking, biking easily around the neighborhood).<\/p>\n

Week 1 (3-1 to 3-7): Calorie intake approximately 11000, cardio 300 minutes\/3417 calories burnt.\u00a0 Starting this experiment with my birthday week, where such things as tex mex hangover brunch buffets, wings, burgers, garlic fries, chocolate heaven, and much much more happened was a doozy.\u00a0 I knew I was a little over by the end of the week but 800 calories?\u00a0 Yikes.\u00a0 8×7 = 56 minutes, so basically, I had to add a whole ‘nother workout day.<\/p>\n

Week 2 (3-8 to 3-15): Calorie intake approximately 11100, cardio 270 minutes\/3732 calories burnt.\u00a0 Then, the birthday celebrations just kept going.\u00a0 The beginning of the week was great cal-wise, but then there was the comedy club and appetizers and drinks.\u00a0 Then there was Zliten’s birthday party.\u00a0 On top of it, I had to add in an extra workout, which oddly enough seemed to directly correlate with wanting more food.\u00a0\u00a0 Fancy that!<\/p>\n

Week 3 (3-16 to 3-22): Calorie intake approximately 10200, cardio 315 minutes\/397o calories burnt.\u00a0 This week I worked REALLY, REALLY hard to get my intake back down so I didn’t have to work out so much the next week.\u00a0 It was miserable.\u00a0 I was grumpy.\u00a0 I just wanted to EAT some days.\u00a0 EAT as much as I wanted, until I felt full, damn the calories.\u00a0 I think there were some day I took bites out of the refrigerator of turkey pepperoni, cheese, chocolate, jelly beans, etc and then just blocked them from my head because I was not going to friggin’ work out for an extra TWO hours the next week.\u00a0 I also found this week I went from craving salty food to sweets.\u00a0 It’s been insane.\u00a0 For the longest time I used to be able to take or leave sweets but now I feel li\"\"ke I could live on fruit, chocolate, etc.\u00a0 For some reason, my body started processing things differently – it wanted FUEL ME NOW food, nothing with staying power.<\/p>\n

Week 4 (3-23 to 3-29): Calorie intake approximately 10500, cardio 370 minutes\/4418 calories burnt.\u00a0 This week was a little more normal, I was able to keep the intake down alright and I almost missed the extra day of working out.\u00a0 Oh yeah, I didn’t.\u00a0 I went on an epic bike ride instead.\u00a0 I would have been at 10200 but I let myself have a little more than normal Sunday because I burnt so much.\u00a0 I was still having the crazy sweets cravings, but I felt less like I was on a desert island rationing my food, awaiting a rescue.<\/p>\n

This week would be a normal workout week if I was going to continue on, but I’m not.\u00a0 I’ve found that I definitely don’t want to eat less – or at least my life doesn’t lend itself to doing so.\u00a0 I also found I don’t really mind working out a bit more, but I also don’t relish HAVING to do it to pay for my sins the week before.<\/p>\n

I’ve also reconfirmed that this part of my life is a juxtaposition right now.\u00a0 The healthy living thing that is making me happy is exercise.\u00a0 However, exercise seems to have very little correlation to weight loss.\u00a0 If I do some, it’s good for me.\u00a0 If I do a lot, I don’t seem to do better.\u00a0\u00a0 The hard part is calorie cutting.\u00a0 I do NOT like limiting my food intake all 7 days of the week.\u00a0 I do NOT like having to restrict fun stuff.\u00a0 However, when I get all uppity about it and become Quix-the-diet-gestapo-grumpsalot, I see progress.\u00a0 I also realize the months where I lose very little weight I AM still making progress.\u00a0 My pants have gone from OK to baggy since March 1.\u00a0 I am a much stronger runner than I was at the beginning of the month.\u00a0 The pants I was wearing yesterday were too-big 11\/12s.\u00a0 The new pants I’m wearing today are actually size SIX (though I’m pretty sure they’re vanity sized, I haven’t worn this size since my gymnastics days, can’t deny it feels good!).\u00a0 I’ve increased my weights and reps.\u00a0 I am all around harder, better, faster, and stronger.\u00a0 It’s not all doom and gloom.<\/p>\n

That being said, I’m done with being uber focused on the calorie counts, at least for a while.\u00a0 I don’t want to live and die by the amount of food I’m eating.\u00a0 I work out pretty darn hard already, I’d rather not have to work out more just because I indulged a bit.\u00a0 And to top it all off – I lost LESS weight this month than ever – I went from 155 to 152.6\u00a0 (and let me tell you, I have not seen that number since last Thursday, I’m floating all over the place in the 153-154s).<\/p>\n

Anyone else have a better weight loss month last month?\u00a0 Achieved a really awesome goal?\u00a0 Hit me up in the comments to bring a ray of light to this not-so-thrilling post…<\/p>\n

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I had high hopes for this little experiment.\u00a0 I had visions of finding that “sweet spot”, like last year, where I could establish a program where I ate a certain amount of food, exercised a certain amount per week, and reliably lost 1-2 lbs per week.\u00a0 You see, besides the times in the past when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paUhDu-aR","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adjustedreality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adjustedreality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adjustedreality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adjustedreality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adjustedreality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=673"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/adjustedreality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":689,"href":"https:\/\/adjustedreality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673\/revisions\/689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adjustedreality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adjustedreality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adjustedreality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}