Say WHAT?

Every time I go over my daily goal, literally every single time I weigh myself the next day to see the "damage" done, and I always lose weight! I ate a whole bunch yesterday and terrible food at that, but I weighed myself and I was down over a whole pound from before I left!

I don't want to increase my daily goal just because of that, but it is sort of nice to know that's apparently how my body reacts.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Side note: At this point, I can't help but think that losing weight is easy. I don't think I've even gone to the gym in over a month and I'm still steadily losing weight and I'm pretty sure I'm not losing muscle mass because I wasn't very muscular before and I'm really just continuing the same sort of lifestyle I was before I decided to live healthier, just eating better.

I am only 7.4 lbs away from my halfway goal!

I am 3.4 lbs away from the goal I set for when I move back to Gainesville in a week. Now, I know that it's completely unreasonable to think that I'm going to lose that much before I go back, but I set my goals so that if I can get within 5 lbs of it, I'm satisfied because I know I'm still making progress, and right now I am even closer than 5 lbs within my goal!


Life is going splendidly! I'm going to a Jason Mraz/ Christina Perri concert in 3 days; I move back to Gainesville in 8 days; M and I's one year anniversary is in 10 days; Gator football starts in 21 days. :D

AHHHH!!

Okay, so this isn't a HUGE deal, but I am SO EXCITED ABOUT THIS.
Today when I woke up, I weighed myself and I saw 169.8 looking back at me. Granted, it's only .2lbs less than the last time I weighed myself, but this is the first time I've seen a number in the 160's since I was 16 or 17 years old?
FINALLY!

EAT!!

Let me just start this off by saying that I am NOT an expert on anything I'm about to discuss, but I do know from personal experience that it works. Hopefully no one takes offense to this.

When first signing up for MFP, it asks you how many pounds you want to lose per week, what your goal is, what you daily goals should be, ect. I know for me, originally, based on MFP's estimates, it was recommended that I consume and net 1200 calories for the fastest weight loss possible. The very next day I began very strictly watching what I was eating and keeping my net around 1200 calories or less depending on my exercise. However, I soon realized that I was kind of cranky and a bit hungry throughout the day, but I figured it just meant that my body was adjusting to the amount of food that I was eating, after all, I didn't get to my highest weight ever by eating proper portion sizes!

Lo and behold, I come across a whole bunch of people saying that I  should be looking up my BMR and eating around there. Since I always need to know about anything, I Googled it, of course. I ended up coming across this website and my calculated BMR is around 1700 calories per day. Now, I'm no expert, but I believe that means that as long as my activity level stays the same, that is roughly how many calories my body uses up, per day, purely by existing. 

Now that just so happens to conflict with the number previously suggested to me by MFP, so I asked around to my friends on MFP and I couldn't find a single one that had tried it and had negative effects as a result, so I figured why not. I set my calorie goal to be around 1550, because apparently it's okay to eat a few hundred (200-300) calories below whatever your BMR is to speed up weight loss. Since then, I've pretty much continuously lost weight, regardless of going to the gym or not. (Going to the gym just helps, and I can eat a little more on days that I do go.)

I guess the concept behind it is that although 1200 calories is what your body needs to stay out of "starvation mode," at that mark, it's kind of difficult to eat exactly 1200 calories per day, and there's still a huge debate as to whether people should eat back exercise calories or not (whatever, another day for my opinion, I suppose). SO BASICALLY, it's a pain in the butt to eat that little each day. If you click "complete entry" with 1199 calories in your diary for the day, MFP will alert you that you are eating too little and that it would be best for you to eat more, so I think it's fair to say that maintaining ONE more calorie per day is NOT the magic number. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I know, I know, this was a bit of a rant, but I've recently told people in my real life about what I've been working towards (now that it's becoming more obvious) and I've ended up finding out that a few people I know in real life have MFP accounts and they are eating at/usually BELOW 1200 calories per day! Yeah, they've lost 5-10lbs maybe, but I can't seem to explain to them that it's not good to be doing that. I know I'm no expert, but I really want to help. I think I do happen to at least know something if I can manage to lose 22 lbs to date in 3 months, and pretty much keep it off (if I didn't want to lose plenty more still, that is).

Sometimes, I wish people would just listen to advice, but I know that sometimes it's best to let them learn on their own. It's just really difficult to do when you know it's going to hurt them in the long run. :/