Amy's Diary

darkangel2

darkangel2

New member
The Diary of Darkangel (Amy)

So here's my first diary post... and a very humbling set of pictures after eating too much at Great Wraps the same day I register on the forum. :mad:





Not too hard to see what the problem is. I've lost weight before, but I never seem to lose enough of it to shake that gut. I'm 23 years old and stand at 5'11. I started at 185, I'm at 173-175 now, and my goal is to be 160. Oh yeah the other thing? I've done this before... about 4 years ago I topped out at 210, and after about a year of self-guided diet and exercise, dropped to 160. I slowly crept back up to 170 and stayed there for a long time, which was ok by me, but a divorce and new relationship and a lot of cokes and pizza put me back up to 185 in the last year.

I love to exercise. I love cardio. The physical part isn't so much of the problem as the eating. I can stick to a diet of 1200 calories for a good period of time, but after a month or two, I start letting things slide. I'll drink a bunch of beers, or eat something I know isn't good for me. I start to ignore my mistakes instead of taking them seriously. That's probably why I'm here, and why I'm having such a hard time losing that last 13 or 15 pounds I know I need to.
 
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Hi Amy, welcome to the forum.

I would suggest NOT starting with 1200 calories a day. You should find out your daily BMR + lifestyle calories and reduce it by say 250-500 calories a day. If you reduce your calories too much to begin with, you are more likely to binge and plateau. If you reduce your calories by 250 and burn 250 calories through exercise a day you can lose 1lb of fat per week. Yes this might take longer, but you wont lose lots of muscle and you have more chance of keeping it off.

I have the same problems as you, i LOVE exercise, but I really lack with the diet part. I eat when Im not hungry, so you just have to ask yourself "am i really hungry, or am i just craving something?". Listening to your body is a great skill, and can be the key to weight loss.

Good luck with your weight loss! Hope I didnt sound too mean or preachy hehe!
 
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Thanks for the advice. I've been doing between 1200-1500 calories a day for about 3 months now, and it's really not a difficult goal for me. I don't binge when I cheat. I just go mannn... I worked out hard yesterday so I'm allowed (for some reason) to eat that pizza. That or I have a stressed out day, or a confrontation, and instantly find myself wanting to eat something. I understand what you're saying though and you may be right. Perhaps if I increase my allowed daily intake, I wouldn't need to cheat. I appreciate it!

Oh I should have put this down too. I've been working with a Polar heart rate monitor (those things are AWESOME!) and during a typical workout I burn 770 calories.
 
I have the Polar F6 -- You wear an elastic chest strap that fits right underneath your boobs if you're a girl. It transmits to a wristwatch that you wear. You input all your info to the wristwatch -- height, weight, age, sex. Then when you're ready to workout, the wristwatch and strap linkup, and it records your exercise. It gives me a constant reading of my heart rate, how long I've been exercising, how long I've been exercising in my target heart rate zone, calories burned, etc... Some of the high end watches get REALLY detailed. At the end of the workout it gives you duration, average and max heart rates, and total calories burned. It's really nice to see what's coming out of your workouts. It saves all your workouts and you can transfer them to your computer. It was a worthwhile investment for me :)
 
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So last night I did a short Tae Bo workout -- which only came to a disappointing 330 calories burned.

Today I had yogurt and a granola bar for breakfast salad and a small serving of crawfish casserole for lunch (even though I know I should really not touch those creamy awful-for-you casseroles), and then another granola bar, and a roast beef sub sandwich for dinner. I don't have a count of what this is, but I'm pretty sure I overshot it. :(

Lunch is pretty difficult for me because I work in a hospital and we usually have catered lunches everyday except Mondays and Fridays. It's tough to resist not only the temptation of yummier food than I would bring, but also the convenience and not having to pay for it. I'm trying to work on my portion control when I do eat these catered lunches because I think I've gotten too lenient with it lately.

At Body Step after work I burned 801 calories, so I feel a good bit vindicated :). My heart rate was 168 average, 194 max.

So anyway, there's my bit for today.
 
So I weighed myself this morning. 172! That's a new number! I was very excited but grounded myself quickly because I've found this to be true -- when I see a new low number appear on the scale, I tend to fluctuate around this number for a few days to a week, before I will actual SAY that I now weigh that much.

Eating was pretty good today. I had about 600 calories between this morning and this afternoon, and then I indulged myself with the guiltiest of all pleasures: delicious, scrumptious, sushi. I have no idea how many calories I ate, and frankly, that's ok. It's been more than 2 weeks since I had sushi, and I used to eat it every Friday, so I think it was well-deserved.

I thought about doing TaeBo tonight, but I looked at my fitness calendar and realized I've worked out EVERY day this week. Don't know how I managed that, but thought I should take a breather tonight and go hit that gym in the morning. I've burning almost 3000 calories this week through exercise. Not too shabby.

By the way, I want to say it's really inspiring reading all of your diaries and before posts. It's fun to see the progress you all make. It's nice to feel like you're 'in this' with other people, not just going it alone.

Ciao.
 
So lesse... It's hard to remember all the details of a long weekend but I shall try. I went and worked out first thing on Saturday. Burned 806 calories. It is very taxing working out first thing in the morning; I suppose it's because I'm so used to doing it after work.

I didn't work out Sunday or Monday. I feel a little guilty about that. :eek: I'm not exactly feeling fantastic about my eating either. I went to my mom's house last night and she made a very fattening dinner. I hate when that happens. I felt like I kind of resigned myself to the fact that it wasn't healthy and took in more than I should have. That is so the wrong way to look at it.

I weighed in this morning at 172 again. So yay! Getting back on today -- got a workout planned for later, as long as my boyfriend is feeling well enough.
 
I didn't work out yesterday. My boyfriend has the flu, and I would have felt pretty guilty having him wait for me to get out of the gym to go back home. Now I feel LAZY. I ate a few handfuls of chocolate chips last night. Feel pretty guilty about that, too. All in all yesterday, this is what I ate:

Yogurt: 120 calories
Granola bar: 120 calories
Salad bar: est. about 300 calories
Subway roast beef sandwich: est. about 400 calories
Frozen fruit cup: 180 calories
Chocolate chips: est. about 200 calories

That's about 1320 calories... Actually I'm kind of surprised once I added it up. I was expecting it to be much worse.

I got on the scale this morning and saw yet ANOTHER new number! Woohoo! 171! I actually felt kinda dopey when I saw it. I thought man, I haven't been working out for a few days, I don't really deserve to see this change right now. So I'm going to do my best today to earn that new number. I've had yogurt already this morning and I'm going to have a carefully portioned catered lunch today. Here's hoping everything goes to plan today.

Unfortunately I won't be able to go to the gym yet again, but my boyfriend downloaded the Girls Next Door Workout DVD, so I'm going to try something different. I feel like I need to change up my at-home workouts anyhow.
 
On Wednesday, I got a really bad sore throat in the evening, and it just got worse yesterday. I still managed to make it to the gym yesterday evening, because I knew if I was getting the same kind of sick my boyfriend was, I would be out of commission for a few days, and I hadn't worked out all week anyway. At Body Step, I was in this kind of drunken daze the entire time. I kept telling myself, 'don't fall, don't fall, don't step wrong'. I was in such an out-of-body kind of state of mind that I probably could have ended up just falling over. I got through it somehow. Burned 808 calories, my heart rate was running pretty high, I think, because of how bad I felt. My max heart rate was 199, and my average was 186 I think. I'm glad I got it over with.

I'm not feeling so good about what I've been eating the past couple of days. I've been indulging way more than is necessary, and I hope to put a stop to that today and this weekend and get back on track. There's no reason to slide backwards at this point -- I just need to push on through.

Weight today: 172.2
 
OMG I have been so sick since last week. I feel like crap. I thought I was finally getting better, but I've been sick to my stomach all day today. It's miserable.

As far as the losing weight is going, I weighed in at 171 today. I'm trying to motivate myself to get over that hump into the 160s. I'm exercising as much as I can while feeling quite shitty. Not much to say :(.
 
I haven't written in here in a long time. Things have been weird. I was incredibly hungry all weekend. I usually weight myself on a daily basis, but I was afraid, and I decided I would face the music on Monday morning and deal with what happened. Well, something quite unexpected is what happened. I took a deep breath, got on the scale... 169. WTF. I haven't even seen that low of a number yet. I hadn't seen a 16- number yet. This number is 9 pounds away from my goal. My boyfriend was smiling and going wow honey good for you! But I didn't deal with it in a positive or excited way. I thought to myself, I don't deserve this, why did this happen. It's almost like if my weight loss isn't slow enough, I don't believe, I don't accept, I almost distance myself from it. That's what I did this morning. I just thought to myself, why, I don't deserve this; I deserve to be punished for my weekend. I don't get it. In some ways, I understand how a heavier person may have problems with a number changing -- problems with dealing with the differences. But I have so little to lose so why am I feeling like this now. I swear I've been holding on to my low 170s like a security blanket and I feel deep inside, now matter how irrational the thought, that it would take nothing more than a week of terrible habits to put me back up to 185 where I started. So... that's my strangeness for the day...
 
Maybe you needed a few extra calories metabolism back up. I have heard that a few days of high calories can be helpful if someone is on a plateau.

Just a thought! You are doing great though... almost there! :D
 
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