Six months and 75 pounds later - pictures

Just curious. I'm starting at the same weight, and doing the 2lbs./wk. How many calories did you burn on the average workout, and did you eat them? Keep up the great work! Good job.

When I first started I was burning about 300 calories per workout, and yes I ate every one of them I often tell people that I don't exercise to lose weight, I exercise so I can eat while I'm losing weight.

I still remember the first time I got that message telling me that I'd lost 10 pounds so I should recalculate my goals. I thought, ok, sounds reasonable, and after I did it suddenly my available calories went down. I was so frustrated! That made me not want to update my goals, but I found by not doing that, meaning not updating your effort and your intake to match your progress, you actually begin to see diminishing returns. So once I understood that I began to look forward to it.

As you lose weight, you will burn fewer calories from the same workout, and your BMR will go down too, meaning you have fewer calories in your daily budget to begin with. Fortunately, I began to discover that I was getting full on smaller portions as well, so it all balanced out.

Now I've progressed to about 900 calories burned in a typical workout, and I eat every one of those too. As I was getting close to my goal, around 70 pounds down, I found myself hitting a plateau, where I basically sat at the same weight for about 3 weeks. I couldn't figure out why, I was still maintaining roughly a 1000 calorie daily deficit. So I decided that maybe being so close to my goal was making me too aggressive, so I reset my goal to losing 1 pound per week, which gave me back about 500 calories per day. As odd as it sounds, once I started eating more suddenly my weight loss continued and I broke out of the plateau. I dropped that last 5 pounds in about two weeks after that.

The key thing to remember is that your body is very good at adapting to whatever stress you put it through, and if you keep doing the exact same thing your body becomes very efficient at doing that, so you begin to see diminishing returns. That's why you need to adjust your routine every couple of weeks, even indulge and go over your calorie budget once in a while, so that you are forcing your body to adjust to new input, rather than allowing it to become very efficient at the same old thing.