Posts Tagged ‘calories’

Week 2 Progress

Sunday, July 12th, 2009

Well it’s the end of week 2 and I’ve just updated my progress charts. The on I’m going to put up here is my weight loss one…

As you can see on the right my weight has gone up 0.5kg.  Very annoying.  At the moment I’m willing to let it slide a little bit but not for long.  I’ll be really disappointed if it goes up again over the next week.

As for the rest of my measurements I think they’re still bedding in and it’ll be interesting to see how they develop.  There’s obviously a lot more error that can occur in these types of measurement and I still need some practise at taking them.

What else has been going on this week?  Well the gym work has continued.  I managed 3 weights sessions and 1 step class this week.  I wanted to get out on my bike this weekend but my improving of the kitchen has got in the way and I’ve been fitting skirting boards and sealing worktops instead.  The main thing that happened this week though was my new scales arrived.


I picked them up from Amazon for about £12 and they are pretty neat.  What I’ve been doing over the past couple of weeks is just generally increasing the amount of food I’ve been having but I haven’t taken another measurement to see if I’m hitting the right amount of calories, protein, carb and fat.  These little bad boys are going to help me do that.

One of the things I was looking for in a set of scales was the abiity to easily tare them.  I wanted to be able to put a bowl on and zero the scales, then add cereal, take a note and zero the scales, then add milk, take a note and zero the scales.  It’ll make it so much easier to count calories compared to trying to weigh everything with the old school scales we had.

My goals for next week… Get in some good weights sessions.  It’s my final week of “beginners” weights so I want a good one before I move on to more advanced weight-lifting stuff.  I also want to get rid of that extra 0.5kg I put on.  Other than that it would be nice to see the general trends start to develop.

Wish me luck.

Sid.

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Nutrition

Monday, July 6th, 2009

Today I ordered myself a little set of digital scales to weigh my food.  I’ve decided to take a step up when it comes to watching what I eat, now it’s not about eating less but weirdly about eating more, just more of the right stuff.

As I’ve mentioned already I’m less concerned with losing weight this time round and more concerned with losing body fat.  That means I need to get my nutrition right so I stand less chance of losing muscle.  To that end I bought a book a fair while ago called “The Complete Guide to Sports Nutrition” by Anita Bean.  I have a few of her books already and find them fairly easy to read and understand.  For some it may be a bit technical but with a  science background I tend to understand the talk about complex carbs and energy delivery systems.

In the book it talks about calculating your daily calorie expenditure and dropping it by 15% to ensure decent weight loss whilst maintaining enough energy to be able to perform exercise well.  When I calculated my daily calorie expenditure I was a bit shocked.  After measuring it for a day with a heart-rate monitor a while ago I thought it would be much lower than what I calculated.  I haven’t got the book to hand at the minute so I can’t recount the equations but I come out with a resting metabolic expenditure of 2209 calories per day.  That means if I just lie around all day and eat 2209 calories then I’ll pretty much stay the same.  It’s what I need to keep ticking over.  Then when I take into account that I live a fairly sedentary lifestyle, sitting at a desk most of the day etc etc, then I figure my daily energy expenditure is about 3093 calories.  Add to that my exercise over the week and it works out to be about 3300 calories a day.  So I can eat 3300 calories a day at my current rate of exercise and remain the same weight.  I’m a bit dubious about that considering I’ve been eating more like 2000 a day and not losing as much weight as you would expect.

But I guess that’s where the whole starvation mode comes into it so I’m willing to give this increased calorie intake a go.

That means if I drop 15% off of the 3300 calories I’m aiming for 2800 calories a day.

At this point last time I would’ve stopped there and just aimed for 2800 per day.  This time though I’m taking it a step further and working out my food composition.  There’s plenty of recommendations in the book, all of which I can’t really recount here but generally to lose weight it suggest cutting fat and increasing protein.  This means the amount I eat per day comes to…

420g of carbohydrate or 60% of calorie intake
160g of protein or 23% of calorie intake
53 g of fat or 17% of calorie intake

I also figured out I should be aiming to drink close to 3L of water a day.

Right now I don’t think I’m close to 2800 calories a day so I’m gradually building up to it.  Once my scales arrive I’ll be keeping a detailed food diary so I can see how I’m doing.  That’s probably going to be in week 3.  Then I’ll start adjusting it as need to get as close to the above amounts as I can without becoming overly obsessive.

It’s a big change for me and I feel like I’m taking a risk in eating so many more calories than I’m used to.  One thing for sure is that I need to be more disciplined with my workouts.  Another Anita Bean book recommends weights 3 times a week with 3 light CV sessions a week too.  Still, the aim is not about weight but about fat loss and muscle gain.  Let’s see how it goes.

Sid

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Weight Loss Tracker – Week 2

Monday, January 19th, 2009

I’ve got a ton of posts brewing but I don’t seem to get chance to post at the minute. To much improving to do. I must start improving my blogging!

Until I make time here’s how my tracker is looking after my 2nd week weigh in.

weight loss tracker week 2

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My Calorie Deficit

Saturday, December 20th, 2008

On paper losing weight is an easy thing, all you need to do is create a calorie deficit.  Use more calories than you consume and you should lose weight.

If you eat more than you burn then your body stores those extra calories as fat ready for when food is scarce.  Burn more than you eat and your body uses those fat reserves for energy.

Sounds simple doesn’t it.  It’s probably the simplest thing about losing weight.  But then people complicate it as they start to talk about all the various ways of losing weight, all the different types of exercises and all the other nutritional considerations you need to make.  They’re right in a way, there is a lot you need to consider in terms of nutrition but get your calorie deficit right and you’ve got a good solid foundation to work on.

Since I’m working towards a set point during a set time here’s how I worked out my calorie deficit.

1 gram of fat is equal to 9 calories
1kilogram of fat is equal to 9000 calories
15 kilograms of fat is equal to 135000 calories
A 15kg weight loss over 22 weeks is equivalent to burning 6200 calories per week more than I eat.
That means a calorie deficit of 877 calories per day.

877 calories per day!  That’s loads.  I hadn’t figured on it being that much.

So I need to burn 877 calories more in a day than I eat.  So how to do it?  Well put simply I need to exercise more and eat less.

I’ve already mentioned that without exercise I burn just under 2000 calories so I’ll be needing to do exercise otherwise I’ll be reduced to eating less than a nutrional amount of food, that’s around 1200 calories.  So I’m going to aim for about 1500 calories worth of food a day and then I’ll need to make sure I burn 2377 calories a day through exercise and sitting around at work.

The scary thing is the amount of discipline it’s going to take to stick to around 1500 calories.  There’s not really much room for slip ups or treats there.

I best get off and start sorting out menus and stuff and figuring out what 1500 calories looks like!

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Baseline Week

Monday, November 10th, 2008

One of the first things I wanted to do this time round was to take a baseline.  My previous attempts at weight loss have always been preceded by a bout of laziness. Over the past few months though my exercise regime has been up and down and my diet has gone along with it.  As we trained for our walk I tended to be a lot more active at weekends and tended to eat more.  Once we finished the walk I found that my eating didn’t drop as much as it should’ve done considering I had stopped exercising as much.

So during this past week I wore my heart rate monitor for a couple of days, I kept a brief food diary and I just paid a little bit more attention to what I was doing.  Here’ what I found.

As an office worker I burn very few calories during the day.
The recommended calorific intake for an average man is 2500 calories per day.  Meaning the average man could eat that much and maintain his weight.  Basing the calculation on my current weight and activity I should be able to eat 3149 calories per day and maintain my current weight of 115kg.  (Have a look at my delicious bookmarks if you want to delve into this a little deeper.) However, I wore my heart rate monitor for a couple of days and accoring to my Polar F6 and the maths it works out for me I burn on average just under 2000 calories a day if I don’t exercise.  It really shocked me to learn I used that few calories during a day.

I actually eat pretty well
My food diary was full of fruit, veg, white meat etc etc.  It contained very few biscuits, cakes and all the other food stuffs you would associated with obese types like me.

I exercise hard
When I exercise I tend to go at it quite hard burning up to 1000 calories per hour.  That’s probably the only reason I’ve been maintaining my weight as well as I have considering how few calories I burn.  However, it does mean recovery can be a problem and sometimes I can’t manage 5 days in a row.

I eat when I’m bored
I already knew this but I eat, or at least go to eat, when I’m bored.

I enjoy gym classes more than the gym
Someone shouting at me gives me plenty of motivation.  I struggle to motivate myself sometimes.

I drink to much tea
5 cups a day.  Far too many.

So that’s it.  My baseline.  Where do I go from here?  I don’t know yet.  Next steps are goals and motivation.

Do you guys know your own baselines or how did you guys start?

Sid.

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