Well folks, it was about time I got myself weighed up, for the first time in years. I've been putting it off for a loooong time, because I was always afraid of knowing the true number. But, I sucked it up, went on over to the GNC store in my local mall, and stood on the scale in front of it.


370 pounds and 12 ounces.


Of course, I was wearing shoes and clothes at the time, so you can subtract probably a pound or so, but it's not like that matters a whole lot.


Unfortunately, this means that I was probably over 400 pounds at some point within the past two years, since I know I'm way less than I used to be.

Anyway, rather than let this get me down, it's helped me reaffirm my dedication towards losing this weight.


The key is this: Everything counts.

Let's say you walk an extra 14 minutes a day, by parking in the back of a parking lot whenever you go somewhere. That's 100 calories right there. 700 calories a week, or 36,400 calories a year. One pound of fat is 3500 calories, so just by walking 14 minutes extra a day, you'll end up burning off 36,400/3,500 = 10.4 pounds per year.

Soda. From 2001 to 2003, I drank approximately 3 24-oz bottles of mountain dew every single day. Sometimes I even got up to 4. There's 330 calories in one bottle, so that's 990 calories a day, 6,930 a week, or 360,360 per year. That's 102.96 pounds, people. Quite amazing, isn't it? Everything counts.

From Novbember 2003 to May 2004 I didn't drink a single drop of soda, and I intended to stick to that. Of course, I fell back into old habbits, and rationalized that I could probably afford to just drink 1 bottle a day, but absolutely no more. But 1 bottle a day is still 34 pounds a year...

Everything counts.


If I maintain my current biking routine, I burn a little over 1000 calories every other day (I plan on increasing this gradually, but in a worse case scenario, let's go with 1000/2days). That's 500 calories a day, or 3500 calories a week. That's 52 pounds a year, for only 182 hours worth of exercise. That's 7.5 full days, or about an entire week. But it's not like I'm wasting my time, either, because biking is fun. You go out, you get to have a life, enjoy nature and the outdoors, and absorb plenty of Vitamin D from the sun (new studies show that the vitamin D absorbed from the sun will save 100 lives for every 1 person who ends up getting melanoma). Having a strong cardiovascular system is enough to boost your life 10 years, in some cases.

Fast food. Let's go with Burger King. You order a super sized Whopper meal.

Whopper - 700 caloriesFries   - 600 caloriesSoda    - 390 calories-----------------------------Total   - 1690 calories

Take note that this ONE meal takes up 85% of the amount of calories you should eat in an entire day if you use a 2000-calorie plan (guys should usually be able to get away with 2300 though, so that takes it down to 73%)

Now what if you go with a medium sized meal with a diet soda?

Whopper - 700 caloriesFries   - 360 caloriesSoda    - 0 calories-----------------------------Total   - 1060 calories

That's 630 calories less. You eat fast food every day? That's 65.52 pounds difference per year.

Like I said; everything counts.


The key to weightloss isn't a fad diet, or working your ass off for a short period of time, or any such bullshit like that. Those are temporary solutions which will put the weight back onto you as soon as you stop. You have to make a complete lifestyle change in order to lose weight. When I'm down to a weight I like, I'm not going to stop biking.

I may end up just biking 1 or 2 times a week at that point, but that should be enough to help me maintain my weight.

Likewise, I'll be taking up anaerobic workouts when I move into my new apartment next week; I'll have enough room to do that kind of stuff now. Extra muscle burns extra calories, after all.


And besides; who has enough room for a king sized meal anyways? Every time I order one, I find myself trying to force the last of the fries and soda down my throat, because humans simply were not designed to eat that much food. A medium fills me up quite well enough, thank you.


BMR is:

Quote:
Your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) shows the number of calories your body needs to operate. This doesn't account for any activity, it's simply the energy needed to sustain a heartbeat, breathing and normal body temperature. It measures the body at rest, not sleep, at room temperature.

Using a number of online calculators, I've gotten approximate BMR values of:

3115
2666
2999
3119
3125
3130
3110

That works out to an average of 3037 calories per day, which honestly sounds too big, but that's to be expected, because the formulas that the calculators use aren't really optimised for sizes that are really big (me) or really small. I'm going to be conservative and estimate that my BMR is actually closer to 2500 calories per day.

You can safely lose up to 2 pounds a week, meaning that I need to have a calorie deficit of 7000 per week, or 1000 a day for the maximum safe weight loss.

If I figure a BMR of 2500, and an extra 500 burned per day (on average, since I do at least 1000 every other day whilst biking), that's 3000 calories per day.

To maintain weight, I need to eat 3000 calories a day. To lose a pound a week, I should eat 2500 calories a day. To lose 2 pounds a week, I should eat only 2000 calories a day. So far today I'm up to 440 calories (2 pop-tarts for breakfast), so I've got 1,560 to go. wheeeee.