Sunday, April 18, 2010

I get it now!


Here I sit at the age of fifty-one, totally amazed that I have actually discovered the long illusive secret to losing weight and keeping it off. Losing weight was never a problem for me. I could give you a timeline of my life showing the many times I have lost weight in the past. Unfortunately, I never did it the right way, or stopped doing it the right way in mid loss, and ended up going back to my starting weight just long enough to start packing on more pounds.The most amazing thing about my new discovery is that it doesn't involve any of the many restrictive diets I have become so expert at adhering to.

I have learned how to eat anything I want, and still lose an average of two pounds per week. It is such a simple thing to do, that I feel like the world's biggest moron for taking so long to get it. But, then I look around at everyone else who struggles with their weight and realize that not many of us have figured it out. For example, one woman I work with is currently on a restrictive diet. No matter what anyone else eats, she has to know the calorie count. If the calorie count is too high for her, she won't touch that item with a ten foot pole. Consequently, she is struggling to maintain a starvation diet. She has lost weight. She looks good. But soon, and very soon, she is going to have to return to eating more food. Then, the weight will start creeping back on. I know. I have done that hundreds of time.

I learned the secret from a friend of mine at work, Addy Johnson. She told me about an app for my iPod Touch that I could use to track what I eat. I downloaded it and put it to work for me on December 19, 2009. That was the first day of our Christmas break. I knew that I was going to drop dead, if I gained my usual Christmas 15 from eating all those holiday goodies. What I didn't know, was that I would get to have them and still lose weight. It was all so easy.

I told the app my weight, my height, my gender, my age, and that I wanted to lose two pounds per week. It told me exactly how many calories I could eat to do just that. It also let me input what exercise I was doing each day. I chose "walking, normal pace, asphalt", since walking is my favorite thing to do that can be called exercise. Hell, it is the only thing I like to do that can in any way be called exercise. I was amazed to see that it gave me back some calories that I could eat in addition to the ones I was assigned daily. Soon, I learned that the more I exercised, the more I could eat. I put two and two together and started making sure that I earned enough extra calories each day to eat whatever I wanted. If I wanted that 600 calorie piece of cake, I knew I had to walk for an hour just to pay that one thing off. Anything else over my daily intake allowance would mean even more. I eventually learned to really evaluate what I did or did not want to exercise more for.

As a result of this wonderful method of balancing what I eat with exercise, I have lost 30 pounds in four months. The really cool thing is that the app adjusts everything as I lose weight. For example, that hour of walking that was worth 623 calories when I weighed 288 pounds, is now only worth 559. My daily food allowance that started out as 2300 has gone down to 2047. That means that I need to exercise even more now, if I want to eat the same amount I am accustomed to. On the one hand, this is no problem. As I drop pounds and get more in shape, I feel a desire to exercise more. Besides, I am also satisfied with less food now, since I have also started making healthier choices. Talk about a win-win situation.

Well that's all I wanted to say. I'll keep you posted as things progress.