Big Weight Loss Goal --- End of the Month

The idea behind the “big weight loss goal” was to make major changes to my lifestyle, as if I wanted to lose 10-20 lb. Then, when I failed, I still would have lost some weight, rather than none. My actual goal was that I wanted my clothes to fit, and all the strategies I’d tried hadn’t worked.

So I figured out a combination of lower calorie consumption and additional calorie burning through exercise to meet my “big weight loss” goal. I thought the extra exercise would be easy because the cardio machines at the gym tell me how many calories I’m burning. But the reality was that I didn’t use those machines much this past month, so I don’t know how many calories I was burning through exercise. However, I did exercise 22 times last month! Consistency is the key!

The hard part was tracking calories. I started to make food choices based on which foods were easy to count the calories, which are not always the best food choices. For instance, packaged foods have the calories marked, but aren’t as healthy as fresh foods. So after a week or two of diligent calorie tracking, I didn’t write it down much, but I still knew in my head how many calories foods had and what size portions I should eat. I’m not online enough to take advantage of one of the online calorie trackers; some of them will tell you how many calories the amount of food you ate has and will add up your calories for the day. Smaller portions were the key here, and I became aware of which foods have a surprisingly large number of calories!

I’m happy to report that I achieved my goal of losing the extra 5 lb. I’ve been hanging onto for most of this year! Yea! My clothes fit better, and I feel stronger, both physically and mentally.