I am not a dummy. I know that weight loss is calories in, calories out. I know what the formulas say my BMR is (1,719). My heart rate monitor and Garmin tell me how many calories I burn during exercise (around 2,000 per week). I know how to record my food and calories in SparkPeople.
However, 95% of the time I am very resistant to calorie counting. I hate it. It is burdensome and makes me sad. It seems to trigger binges for me. I haven’t counted calories in months, and I’m currently binge-free for 89 days – I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
But calories DO matter! Whether I count them or not, the calories I consume are what’s causing my body to hold onto this fat. (I think I have the exercise part of the equation down, and I have no trouble recording the calories spent exercising – I do it everyday!) I need to eat less calories. Does that mean I need to record my food everyday? It would be a HUGE help, but I don’t want to spark my crazy. So what can I do? I think I am going to try to count calories one day a week, just to get a general idea of what I’m consuming. I want to see how much ice cream I’m eating after dinner every night.
I started today, and so far, between the work candy bowl and my grabbing a handful of salted, oil roasted cashews, I have consumed 288 extra unplanned calories. I thought “no big deal.” I probably eat something like that everyday. But then I decided to calculate out the result of doing that everyday. Over a year, consuming an additional 288 calories per day would result in 105,120 unwanted calories. Yowzers! Then the scary part – divide that by 3,500 calories per pound, and it equals 30 pounds, almost on the nose. I just so happen to be approximately 30 pounds overweight.
Maybe this sounds silly to people who have thought about it before, but this shocked me! 288 calories doesn’t seem like a lot. Before I calculated it out, I thought “that’s not so bad, I could do that everyday.” But now I know. And I’m going to stay away from that candy bowl for the rest of the day.
On the brighter side, my workout schedule has me burning 2,000 calories/week, which is 104,000 per year, which is just under 30 pounds