When I posted about my quest to find my happy weight, then announced that I was going to attempt to find it by calorie counting, I figured I would get some mixed responses. However, the majority of the feedback has been nothing but supportive and those that haven’t have been respectful and commented only out of concern. I am painfully aware that calorie counting is a touchy subject for some, so I am going to attempt to discuss this topic in a way that does not offend anyone. However, if you can’t bear to read anything on the subject, please feel free to skip these posts. I promise you won’t miss anything important, like a precious photo of Rascal (I’m saving that for my next post).
Well, I made it through an entire week of calorie counting without losing my head.
To be honest, I wasn’t extremely strict about following my suggested calorie intake. I just made sure to track everything I ate to get a realistic view of how many calories I typically eat.
Many of you asked what program I am using to track calories. I am using Calorie King, which is not a free program, but I think it’s well-worth the money. You can start with a seven day trial to see how you like it. I did a few trial runs with other programs and continued to look at others throughout the week, telling myself that if I found one I liked just as much, I would cancel the $12 monthly charge today.
Today, I decided to stick with them through this process.
I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned here, oh about a thousand times, that I’m a highly visual person. So when I found that they have all these handy little charts and graphs to show progress and calorie intake, I was sold.
They had me at bar graph.
This chart shows my net calories over or under my net calorie target. As you can see, on Thursday and Friday, I went quite a bit above my net calorie target, but came slightly under most other days. I knew that I had gone over on Thursday and Friday but was actually surprised to see I had only gone over X amount. I thought it was much more.
Since I began this whole process last Monday, today was my weekly weigh-in. I had dropped 1.4 lbs. in a week. I’m aiming for one pound a week. There’s a three pound range in which I always hover and when I started this quest to find my happy weight I was at the upper range of those three pounds.
I don’t think I’ll feel like I’m making “real” progress until I get out of this range, but that’s just me being negative. In reality, any progress is a victory.
I didn’t feel deprived at all this past week. I enjoyed some of my favorite foods, I went out to dinner Thursday and Friday, drank wine, and shared a snickerdoodle with Brad that was the size of my head yesterday. I also ate tons of veggies, worked out pretty consistently, and tried to balance splurges with healthy choices.
Speaking of working out, notice the “Weekly Work-It-Out” box on the left side of my page? This will now be taking the place of Fitness Friday. I’m still going to blog about fitness occasionally, but for now, this little tally will be my only weekly summary of exercise.
This pie chart was one of the most interesting things I recently found on Calorie King. I’ve been aware for a while now that there’s a recommended percentage of carbs, protein, and fat for a diet, but never really cared to calculate whether my diet fit within that recommendation. I can see the exact percentages by hovering over each slice of the pie graph in Calorie King, but since you can’t see them, I’ll share them with you.
Protein – 22%
Fat – 23%
Carbs – 53%
I barely ate any meat last week, so it’s quite interesting to see that such a high percentage of my calories came from protein. I got between 40 and 97 g of protein every day, but topped out in the 90’s most days. This just goes to show that you can get plenty of protein eating a variety of food, not just meat.
Takeaway’s from this week:
1. You don’t have to hit your “perfect” calorie target every day to make progress.
2. Plenty of protein can be found in non-animal products.
3. Calorie King has awesome charts and graphs.