Calorie counting has never been something that I considered doing, although I’ve been on various diets all my life and I have certainly been exercising since I was very young. It’s never been easy for me to maintain my weight.
Recently I began a quest for the perfect body. After years and years of crash diets, gym memberships and sports, I am seeing some real improvement from sticking with the P90X program religiously and counting calories on the Livestrong site. I am now 180 pounds but I’m looking toward leaning down to below 170.
This last ten pounds has been somewhat murderous. I have found that if I keep my calories to the minimum and stay away from any pitfalls I can lose about 2 pounds a week. This is tedious. The big key is not faltering–at all. I have really had to keep my wits about me.
The problem is that there are various food items out there that can ruin your diet if you’re not paying attention at all times. Every day has to be perfect. I could easily just workout and get a lot of muscle, but the fat will never seem to go away unless I change my food addiction.
I just read the cover article in Time Magazine. I think it was an important article in what it had to say, but their point that exercise can cause overeating was very disturbing. This writer’s point was that sometimes because we are working out more, and burning more calories, we think we deserve to eat more food, and worse food. Often times the extra food we consume negates the exercise calorie burning benefits. The writer goes further to say basically that the willpower that we use to exercise is actually depleted when we use it and therefore we won’t have as much willpower to resist bad food.
In order for me to be in the great shape that I desire, I need to have both the willpower to workout and the willpower to eat the right foods. It’s a challenge that I’m up to, but it also requires a change in how I look at food. Over the past 110 days I’ve been doing P90X, I’ve become much more responsible about the foods I eat. I have found that I can eat low calorie foods and be satisfied. Some of my favorites have been lowfat cottage cheese, snap peas, mandarin oranges, 0% yogurt and baby carrots. Yesterday I was at a farmers market and someone sold me on some wafer thin cheese product called Thinkrisps. They were very good, and they boasted that they were low-carb and only 60 calories per round pancake of cheese. My wife and I bought them. I ended up eating three of them that day. Afterwards I went to record the calories on the livestrong site and I found that the ones we bought were 165 calories each and 13 grams of fat in each one. That was a bummer. This is an example of how one has to be vigilant when one is trying to lose weight. On top of that my wife got a headache from the seasonings that woke her up at 3am and wouldn’t let her sleep.
The long and the short of it is this. Diet and exercise is the key. Vigilance, tenacity, persistence, consistency. Keep your eye on the goal and don’t listen to too many people. I will report back with my further findings. As it stands now, I’ve been working out for 110 days and watching my calories for about a month. I have lost about 20 pounds. There must be something to diet and exercise.
