60 day report. Minor physical change but a MASSIVE mental on

I wonder how many of you reading this will see yourselves reflected in what I have written here.

I started using MFP just over 2 months ago because I saw my daughter (emrose1990) using it and it just seemed like something interesting. I don’t have a huge amount of weight to lose but have struggled to maintain a healthy physique for as long as I can remember. If I ever wanted to lose a bit of weight I just ate a bit less and exercised a bit more and it always seemed to work. Notice that I said ‘always’, thereby implying that it’s been a pretty regular thing.
For the purposes of avoiding confusion.. I can tell you that it has been a tortuously regular thing.

It wasn’t helped particularly that I was in the armed forces and spent months away from home during which I would lose lots of weight and then come home and put it all back on again. Now that I have left all of that (armed forces) behind me, I am constantly wary that ‘up and down’ might turn in to ‘up and up’.

So I guess I was looking for a solution and MFP came along to fill the gap.

I have to tell you that the stuff I have learned from this website over the past few months has really staggered me and changed my ideas about fitness and diet completely.

When I first started, at the end of January, It was time to start my post Christmas diet. So as per usual, started eating a bit less and exercising a bit more and was really pleased to see my weekly net calories were approximately 1500 per day. Good vindication that my regime was working. Over the course of several weeks as I became slightly more obsessive about counting my calories, much to the merriment of my colleagues (scanning packets from my lunch at my desk), I realized that I was eating less and less and my weight loss stopped. My dairy is open.. look at week (3 mid Feb).. my net calories were about 1200. (My BMR is 1750)

Things more or less continued in that vein for the next month or so with my net daily calorie average never going above 1800, but usually a bit less.

This is a prime example of “little knowledge.. lot of damage”. I thought I was doing it correctly and the ability to track calories was the missing piece of the jigsaw. I didn’t bother reading the community forums because I didn’t think that there was much I didn’t know about my own body, and how to lose weight. How staggeringly ignorant I was.

There are some fantastic posts on here and over the past month I think that I have read them all.

So.. to my mental change.. This past week I upped my calories to a 2000 net daily average. I have never eaten so much in my life. It is a scary alien concept that I am changing something that I have believed all of my life. How can you eat more food and still lose weight??

In all honesty, If I had a lot of weight to lose then I probably wouldn’t have the nerve to do it. But I am willing to accept that I am going to gain weight and have taken the precaution of putting my scales in the attic. I am going to increase my net daily calories by about 100 each week and just monitor for change in ways that don’t involve me getting depressed at increasing numbers on the scales. This week I am aiming for 2100.

My next goal is to try and eat back my exercise calories with something more healthy than chocolate. Lets not rush into it though. Slow and steady remember, and calories are calories. (More ignorance?)

The workouts I have been doing are beginning to show benefits in that my shape is changing. Clothes fit better and I feel generally much healthier. I’m really genuinely quite excited to see how the next few weeks go and no longer think that an ideal BMI is something for other people.

Wish me luck!

Ian