I’ve been writing about watching what I’ve been eating a bit more often over the past few months. In turn, I’ve also been blogging about all of the incidental things that results in. And that’s mostly because I’ve been getting good results. Fifteen pounds in 3 months is decent and healthy, isn’t it? Well, through the holiday season my weight lost slowed down considerably. I blamed it on the holiday eating. Seemed like the logical thing to do, right? At the very least, I can say that I didn’t gain anything over that tough period. Yay me, I guess. Well, here I am now in mid-January and it seems like my progress has all but slowed to a really slow drip. It’s been bugging me for a while now. I’m increasing my mileage and the amount of calories I’ve been burning. Shouldn’t that be having some accelerated effect? Clearly something in the equation was off. It took me a while to figure it out, but I finally found it.
So, I’ve been using an online food tracker to keep an eye on my intake. I’ve been pretty religious about putting my information in. It’s really necessary for me to do so just so I can get a good idea if I’m over-eating or not. At the beginning the tracker was picking ranges that were somewhat low and restricted. At first I found that I was getting to the end of the calories before the end of the day. In time I adjusted and started eating healthier just to be able to stay in range. If I compare the ranges I had back then to the ranges that are being picked out for me these days, the difference is actually kind of big. I’d almost say that there’s been a 400 calorie daily shift. The change over time in the range was so slow that I didn’t even notice. That might explain why weight loss has slowed down to a trickle.
So, what happened? Why did the program change things like it did? Well, this evening I checked out the goals that I originally picked. I was surprised to find that I was actually pretty close to my original goal. Also, my goal date was still a long time away. As a result, the site adjusted the ranges to have me lose at a rate slow enough to hit the weight exactly by the deadline. Hahah. That explains so much. So! I fiddled around with the settings and changed my goal and goal date to something more sensible.
My goal is to shed 1 lb. per week. I’ve set my deadline to be the end of April. This is a very healthy and reasonable goal. After plugging my data into the site, it adjusted my caloric ranges back to what I saw back in October. Nice. I ready to set the graphs back on a downward slope. Yes! Let’s get’er done!
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