New guy from Vermont

Greetings fellow fitness pals,

Never done anything like this before (tracking calories and exercise) but I'm willing to give it a shot, in hopes that I'll lose some serious weight by summer. All my life I have been an active person and have pretty much always been able to eat whatever I wanted without regard for calories or exercise but, in the last few years, it seems that my metabolism has slowed down and thus I have become about 30 lbs overweight (much to my dismay). That being said, I joined one of my local Gyms, and this forum and started working out and logging my daily food intake last night.

The good: I feel positive about all of this and hope that it will finally allow me to shed these extra pounds and get healthier/back in shape. I would like to balance this new idea of calorie restriction with exercise in a fun way (otherwise It will never stick). My current idea for this is to go to the gym 3-4 days a week, and then try to do other, less formal exercises, during the other days of the week, like ice skating, swimming, or sledding (remember, the bigger the slide, the bigger the hill one must walk up).

The bad: Seeing how many calories I can have versus how many calories I normally eat is very scary. I had always thought that I was eating close to the norm for calorie intake but, looking at how I was eating 3 months ago, I can see that I was very, very wrong about that. I was probably eating over 4,000 calories a day on a regular basis! Now I do have an active job as an electrical and plumbing contractor, and I'm sure that helps, but I do wonder how my body will cope with having so much less daily calories? Yesterday and today, I went over my calorie goal. Yesterday by about 480 calories, and today by about 260 and I'm not sure I am quite ready to have only 2040 calories a day... still, at 2300, I'm doing a lot better than this time last month.

Anyway, I guess that's all that's pertinent for now. Not sure how often I'll post here but, thanks for reading

~Glenn