Week 1 - 267lbs

In my first blog post I mentioned I would use this to space to keep me honest about some of my goals this year. Well the biggest goal of the year and basically why I started the blog is to get back to eating at a healthy level, not diet mind you although eating correctly will probably result in me losing some pounds. There are many different levels of eating healthy and for me the first step in doing that is going to be eating within my calorie range.

How do you know what your calorie range should be you might ask? Well for me I use the Harris Benedict equation (BMR = 66 + ( 6.23 x weight in pounds ) + ( 12.7 x height in inches ) - ( 6.76 x age in years )) to figure out mine. Now you’re probably saying, What the heck is that and why would you use it. Basically it’s a method used to estimate your daily calorie in take and you can read about it on Wikipedia here Harris-Benedict_equation. Don’t worry about doing the math unless you like numbers like me because there are plenty of online calculators that use this principle. Go to Caloriesperhour  and click on BMR & RMR Calculator.

According to the site based on my info and taking into account that I consider myself lightly active my Basal Metabolic Rate (BMB) is 3,295 and Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) are 2,981. What does that mean? It means that is I want to maintain my weight of 267 pounds I need to eat between 3,295 and 2,981 calories A DAY. Now you might be thinking wow that’s a lot of calories but if you’ve ever done a food log you can see how quickly the things we eat and snack on add up. Obviously I don’t want to maintain a weight of 267lbs in its current distribution on my body, meaning that a high amount of that is just fat and not muscle or bone.

Starting today I’m going to begin my food log again and aim for a caloric intake of between 1,800 and 2,000 calories a day. I’ve used this technique about 5 yrs ago and it helped me shed about 70lbs. Monitoring your caloric intake can be time consuming and a tough task but I think its well worth it for the health of your body. Over the next few weeks I will take about some of the tools I’m using and how my journey to eating healthier is going.

I also think goals are an important thing to have but in this case I’m not going to set a “goal weight”. However I am going to set a goal of days eating within my calorie range that will total in 12-week increments. There are 84 days in a 12 week period and since I’ve done this before my goal might be a little bit higher then yours if your doing this for the first time. My goal is to eat within that range 70 times out of 84(83%), which doesn’t mean those 14 days I can eat 5,000 calories but we all know life can get in the way sometimes and I don’t want to give up just because I hit one of those patches.