ARMY ready after two kids... help?

SusanMFindlay

Lord007 wrote: »

kpressnell2017 wrote: »

So it says bmr is 1950 and tdee is 2750

Should I start high and lower or the opposite?

My recommendation is to set it at what your calorie burn is for 0 activity/exercise. The logic being, any exercise will be contributing to your goal versus counting it in and then not doing it for whatever reason life provides (sickness, injury, crazy day, kids sick, etc.)
1) Get a scale and weigh EVERYTHING. It will also help reset your eyes and brain as to what a single portion really looks like. Something to remember: the weights on prepackaged foods do have some variance.
2) Log EVERYTHING.. every morsel, bite, lick, nibble. Those can add up. If you don't want to do it forever, do this at least for the next 3 months so you can see how much they can add up.
3) Exercise, in some form, EVERY day for at least 30 minutes. More is better.
4) Weigh yourself frequently. It's easier to make corrections after one or 2 bad days than it is after a few bad weeks.
5) (if you aren't already) Incorporate each of the exercises from the PRT in your training.. even better if you do it in addition to your training/exercise. Get to the level where you easily exceed the minimums by 20% more or better.
Pushups - Min: 11
Sit-ups - 43
2 mile Run - 20:36
In addition to the above, walk... ALOT. Do it with weighted a backpack (even if it's just stuffed with books, rocks, sand, whatever.) You'll be doing alot of marching so might as well get conditioned and used to it now. This is something you can also do just about daily (depending on our lovely DFW weather). Depending on the age of your kids, you can do this pushing them in a stroller.. or strapped to your back as weight.
Boot camp is just as much physical as mental. Getting the physical part locked down means you can concentrate just on the mental aspect.
The good news? Your head seems like its' in the right place: on improvement rather than excuses. You've got lots of time to get to your goal so long as you stay focused and committed every day. You've gotten alot of solid advice on this thread. Use it to help you.
Feel free to add me as a friend as well.

I agree with almost everything in this post. The only thing I disagree with is the advice to set calorie burn at 0 exercise. If you are a person who gets a lot of "nonpurposeful exercise" (in other words, is on their feet a lot, chases kids a lot, etc.), you are better off choosing the appropriate activity level and only logging actual "work outs" on top of that. It is very difficult to track "nonpurposeful exercise" if you don't have an activity tracker like a FitBit, and they can really add up for some people. (You could get a pedometer, wear it all day and add all the steps as one exercise if you wanted, I suppose. But then you'd have to figure out how many steps were already counted in the "sedentary" setting; I think it's about 3000?)

It might seem like a good idea to just burn these "extra" "free" calories without logging them for extra-fast weightloss, but it could also see you undereating dramatically, being hungry all the time and increase your risk of raiding the pantry after the kids go to bed. For context, I get 15-20K steps per day between my job and parenting. FitBit typically gives me about 400 calories extra per day *over and above* the "active" setting - which is already about 600 cals/day over "sedentary". So, if I had followed the recommended approach and been able to stick to that calorie limit, I would be undereating by 1000 cals/day and losing 2 pounds/week *more* than my goal. That might sound good in the short term, but it would not be good weight loss because I would have exceeded my body's ability to burn fat and it would have started burning muscle instead.