Hey all!
Since the beginning of summer I have decided to finally get myself in shape and lose my excess poundage. I've done a lot of reading on the calories in/out, deficits and exercise, changed a lot of things about my diet and activity and finally started seeing some results. All this fine and dandy, as I was reading more I started thinking that I might have hosed up with some things and may be actually overdoing the stuff. Hence why I figured I'd post and inquire here and clear some of my confusion.
A bit about me:
Age: 20
Weight: 200 lbs
Height: 5'4''
My usual food is broken into:
breakfast: oat or cereal + skim soymilk + half banan
lunch: sandwich (whole grain bread, lettuce, tomato, red bell pepper, onion, mozarella cheese [limit/cutting it out recently], kroger turkey ham)
dinner: usualyl rice/pasta stir fry with frozen veggie blends and some sliced turkey franks OR scrambled eggs (mostly just whites) with veggies OR something similar to that
Though, recently, I started splitting into the 5-6 meals a day (i.e. I'll split my sandwich in half and also throw in a fruit like orange, banan, red grapes or apple in between).
As for drinks, I drink water exclusively (plus soymilk in breakfast). I also don't snack (save maybe a pickle when making a sandwich or one small piece of chocolate a week, pretty negligible stuff).
Normally, my activity is sedentary ( typical day: 1 hour sitting on bus, 8 hours sitting in front of computer working, 1 hour on a bus (again), few hours in front of comp playing games / browing net /etc sleep. rinse, repeat ). To combat that, I picked up exercise and extra walking. I go for a 20-30 minute jog 4 times a week Mon/Tue/Thur/Fri. I know 20 mins isn't much, but since I am (was?) utterly out of shape I had to start slow and build my endurance, and it's still a nice improvement over 5 minutes before I was totally dead just a month ago. Additionally, I recently started walking over a mile every day (mainly in the evening after I get off work), and on weekends I also walk something around 5-10 miles (Sat/Sunday combined). And lastly, when I go back to campus in less than a month, I am planning on picking up weight lifting (yay campus gym!)
So this is what my routine has been like for the past month (well, two, but I didn't track stuff down and exercise the first one). I am not aiming to become uber muscular stud, I merely want to get into my healthy weight range and maybe put a bit on muscle through weight lifting later on. I think what I am doing now should accomplish this goal pretty well (I already lost one notch of my belt wee). But I had once concern.
I recently started tracking my calories on TheDailyPlate.com and they came out to be around 1,200. Now, I've used various e-calculators of daily caloric maintenance level which told me I was around 2000-2400 cals. Taking in consideration my life was pretty sedentary, the fact that 500 cals a day = 1 lost pound and it's safe to lose up to 2 pounds, dropping my calories by 1000 seemed reasonable. But then I looked into my BMR which was about 1900 and also started thinking about the jogging and walking I am doing and started to realize that, crap, I think I've been starving myself.
So yea, that's sort of what brought me here. My plan is to up my caloric intake to 2000 which should be good since I will be above my BMR but still low enough to be losing weight at a good rate. What are your thoughts?
One thing that really struct me as odd is that I read about, how putting yourself in 'starvation mode' (which I believe I might have accidentally done) will meak you languid and weak. Yet, after about 2 months of under-eating I actually feel just fine. Not better than when I was eating normally or overeating, but not any worse either. And I've been able to progressively increase my jogging distance too. That was one of the reasons why I didn't consider the low cals to be an issue until I started reading up more about it.
Since the beginning of summer I have decided to finally get myself in shape and lose my excess poundage. I've done a lot of reading on the calories in/out, deficits and exercise, changed a lot of things about my diet and activity and finally started seeing some results. All this fine and dandy, as I was reading more I started thinking that I might have hosed up with some things and may be actually overdoing the stuff. Hence why I figured I'd post and inquire here and clear some of my confusion.
A bit about me:
Age: 20
Weight: 200 lbs
Height: 5'4''
My usual food is broken into:
breakfast: oat or cereal + skim soymilk + half banan
lunch: sandwich (whole grain bread, lettuce, tomato, red bell pepper, onion, mozarella cheese [limit/cutting it out recently], kroger turkey ham)
dinner: usualyl rice/pasta stir fry with frozen veggie blends and some sliced turkey franks OR scrambled eggs (mostly just whites) with veggies OR something similar to that
Though, recently, I started splitting into the 5-6 meals a day (i.e. I'll split my sandwich in half and also throw in a fruit like orange, banan, red grapes or apple in between).
As for drinks, I drink water exclusively (plus soymilk in breakfast). I also don't snack (save maybe a pickle when making a sandwich or one small piece of chocolate a week, pretty negligible stuff).
Normally, my activity is sedentary ( typical day: 1 hour sitting on bus, 8 hours sitting in front of computer working, 1 hour on a bus (again), few hours in front of comp playing games / browing net /etc sleep. rinse, repeat ). To combat that, I picked up exercise and extra walking. I go for a 20-30 minute jog 4 times a week Mon/Tue/Thur/Fri. I know 20 mins isn't much, but since I am (was?) utterly out of shape I had to start slow and build my endurance, and it's still a nice improvement over 5 minutes before I was totally dead just a month ago. Additionally, I recently started walking over a mile every day (mainly in the evening after I get off work), and on weekends I also walk something around 5-10 miles (Sat/Sunday combined). And lastly, when I go back to campus in less than a month, I am planning on picking up weight lifting (yay campus gym!)
So this is what my routine has been like for the past month (well, two, but I didn't track stuff down and exercise the first one). I am not aiming to become uber muscular stud, I merely want to get into my healthy weight range and maybe put a bit on muscle through weight lifting later on. I think what I am doing now should accomplish this goal pretty well (I already lost one notch of my belt wee). But I had once concern.
I recently started tracking my calories on TheDailyPlate.com and they came out to be around 1,200. Now, I've used various e-calculators of daily caloric maintenance level which told me I was around 2000-2400 cals. Taking in consideration my life was pretty sedentary, the fact that 500 cals a day = 1 lost pound and it's safe to lose up to 2 pounds, dropping my calories by 1000 seemed reasonable. But then I looked into my BMR which was about 1900 and also started thinking about the jogging and walking I am doing and started to realize that, crap, I think I've been starving myself.
So yea, that's sort of what brought me here. My plan is to up my caloric intake to 2000 which should be good since I will be above my BMR but still low enough to be losing weight at a good rate. What are your thoughts?
One thing that really struct me as odd is that I read about, how putting yourself in 'starvation mode' (which I believe I might have accidentally done) will meak you languid and weak. Yet, after about 2 months of under-eating I actually feel just fine. Not better than when I was eating normally or overeating, but not any worse either. And I've been able to progressively increase my jogging distance too. That was one of the reasons why I didn't consider the low cals to be an issue until I started reading up more about it.
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