Sheepish return

I managed one week of enthusiasm, back in May.  It's now the first of October and as of this morning, my weight was 13st 7lb.  So I've blatantly not done anything constructive with regards to losing weight in the interim.  Nor have I become any more active.  I'm not entirely sure that I can say why on either front, other than the enthusiasm petered out nearly as quickly as it arrived.  However, I must have some type of six month itch, because I find myself returning to that place and being preoccupied with doing something about it all.  There's a positive, I've not put any weight on in that six months, so at least I'm only eating the kcalories to maintain it!

Looking at an online calculator, it seems that my Basal Metabolic Rate at the moment is 1536.64 and that to maintain my weight, I'm eating around a daily figure of 1,844 kcalories.  That's really not much in the grand scheme of things, so I can stop pillioring myself for massive overeating.  It's obviously not really that which is at fault, but the fact that I don't do anything exercise wise.  So that's the bit that I'm probably going to really have to concentrate on.  Although, I'd be stupid to just leave my diet entirely alone - so back to the same calculator and it suggests that if I weren't to change my exercise habits, but be eating to maintain what I consider to be a healthy goal of 10st, then I'd be averaging 1,588 kcalories.  So - if I give myself a daily allowance of that, I should be eating a diet of around 220g carbohydrate, 60g protein and 50g fat.

That difference in kcalorie intake on its own would be saving me around 1750 kcalories per week - enough to lose half a pound of fat.  Which would equate to about two years before attaining that weight.  I'd like to cut that time in half, which means that I need to supplement it by exercising enough to get my Basal Metabolic Rate to increase and to expend the other 1750 kcalories per week during that exercise.  That really means finding an activity/activities which I can tackle five times per week, each of which will burn 350 kcalories.  I'm also going to have to build up to those, I think. 

So I need to understand that I'm not going to lose much in terms of weight in the first six weeks at all.  Probably about 3lb.  Having just done all those mathematics makes me understand where I was going wrong.  If I'd wanted to lose 2lb per week, I'd have needed to cut back by 1,000 kcalories.  If I were trying to only take in 850 kcalories per day, my body would be rightly telling me that I was starving.  And it's virtually impossible to take in sufficient micronutrients, fibre and phytochemicals  for good health at that level of calorific intake.  So I'd set myself up for failure and then got disinterested when I didn't see any results, because I thought naively that watching myself have about 1500 kcalories would get good results.  I'd taken out the fact that the last time I truly dieted seriously, I was WAY more active than currently.  Ah well, at least I understand now. 

I need to remember too, that my muscles have no doubt dwindled whilst I've not been using them, so any exercise will start to rebuild them, so whilst I may not be losing weight, I may be redistributing my body percentages between fat and lean tissue.  I'm going to fall back on an old and trusted method of taking photographs of my body, as well as measuring, because since I live with myself, I'll be hard pushed to see the results for myself, without keeping some type of objective record like that.  I'll post those when I've taken them