I’m kind of an analytical guy, so it tends to be easier for me to process something if I can see it in numbers. That said, you would think that weight loss would be easier for me…
According to this calculator:
My daily caloric needs at my current weight are 2,856.2 calories.
So likewise, if I was to maintain a diet of 2,000 calories per day, in theory I should be burning 5,993.4 calories per week (or 1.7 pounds).
The tricky part is that clearly there are some hidden variables here because I’ve done exactly that and only lost a minimal amount of weight over a fairly short period of time. And not that I’m even looking for it all at once anymore – I’ve been trying unsuccessfully for years now, so if I could regularly lose 6 – 7 pounds per month and keep it up, I’d be tickled pink to spread it out and finally hit my target weight six months later!
Of course, the other side of the equation is that it’s tough to remember back, but maybe I wasn’t actually doing as well at maintaining 2,000 calories/day as I would’ve liked to think. Maybe there were some slip-ups in there, or it wasn’t always the best kinds of food that were making up my total. In the past, I’ve used actual calorie counters like SparkPeople which are great, but unless you set aside the time to use them every single day throughout the day, I’ve found that they can quickly grow kind of tedious.
Right now I’m kind of trying to do a mental version of the calorie counter, in that I do my best to add up totals in my head throughout the day before and while I eat, but I’m not officially recording the results anywhere. It’s one of those things I think where while having the data can be interesting – especially when trying to identify your weak points, if it’s too much to keep up for a long period of time, there’s no sense in going through all of that legwork.