Updates

I'm sick. I've had a head cold since Friday. I've also been out of town visting relatives all weekend. I'll blog about how love = food later.

About eating less than 1000 kcal - I'm not starving myself or anything like that. I don't plan on not eating. Sometimes it just happens. I just try to write down everything I eat on a given day. I don't seperate it by meals or anything. So if I eat the same thing for lunch and dinner it will only be listed once. I know I'm rambling now.


I've been doing some digging on the internet today (in between blowing my nose and dosing myself with medicine). And now I have more of an idea of what I need to be eating. I grew up with Southern (Deep South, USA) cooking as a standard, which isn't the healthiest diet out there. So I'm branching out on my own here, trying to eat healthy and lose weight. And if what I'm doing is working, I'll try my best to get my dad to cook the way that I do. While both of my parents are at a healthy weight (my dad still does his exercises every morning and has the body of a man 20 years younger) neither my sister or I am. I know that I am morbidly obese (BMI = 42), and I am certain that my younger sister is obese type 2. She lost 20 lbs recently, but that was from illness, which is not the way you should lose weight.


During my adventures on the internet today, I happened across Wikipedia, as I usually do. After following a few articles around, I calculated my Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) and determined it to be 1816. That is the amount of calories I need to maintain my weight, if I were completely inactive. The safest diet restriction is 75% of your BMR, in my case that is 1362. So I will be eating at least 1362 calories a day.


I got a scale over the weekend, and was confronted with the sad and slightly shocking fact that I weigh 276 lbs - 11 more than I thought. I knew I'd been yo-yoing from 255-275 in the past year, but I'd thought I was in the middle at this point, instead of on the high end. I'm approaching my heighest weight ever, a fact that scares the living daylights out of me. So having the scale there to motivate me is really going to work.