John’s Ramblings

or, “I’ve been stuck at 230 for a week, and I’m pissed.”

I have found it useful to track my input (food) vs. output (calories burned) in order to get a better handle on this weight loss thing.  My tool of choice has been the FitDay website and software.  The website allows you to:

1. track all the food and beverage you consume, and it calculates your caloric intake and some basic nutrition information.
2. track all your exercise activities, including the number of calories burned doing each one.
3. calculate your base metabolism based on your age, size, and usual daily activity level, or how many calories you burn daily just at work, home etc. (not including “exercise”, per se).

Then your net calories burned vs. eaten are calculated by taking “1″, and substracting “2″ and “3″.  Simple?  Maybe not.

Based on the kinds of activities that I do during the day (hours spent in front of the computer, walking around, etc.), FitDay says my base metabolism burns about 2,700 calories a day.  Real life is telling me that it is significantly less than that.  For example, yesterday I had a typical workday, and I consumed 1,800 calories over the course of the day.  So, in theory, I had a caloric deficit of 900 calories that should have manifested itself as a negative adjustment on the scale.  Not so, as I’m up a pound.

Granted, there’s water weight issues and daily fluctuations that are meaningless in the greater scheme of things.  Still, I’ve been keeping my intake on track all week, and have no results to show for it.

I can “tweak” the metabolism settings in FitDay to more closely match reality.  If yesterday is any indication, my actual base metabolism is somewhere south of 2,000 calories.  I’m thinking that if I can set it somewhere around 1,800 a day, I might be close.  The lowest metabolism in the software is for sleeping, or 1.18 calories per minute. ((1.18 calories x 60 minutes) x 24 hours) = 1,699 calories per day.  So, the way I’m seeing it, my base metabolism is pretty much like I’m sleeping 24/7 (then why am I so tired?).

In addition to making some computer software adjustments, I think I need to make some John software adjustments as well.  I need to get the metabolism cranked up earlier in the day, which means making time in the early a.m. to do some intervals or something.

Tags: exercise, FitDay, weight loss

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