With My Fitness Pal you can also log and keep track of your weight.  As you can see I started on July 20th. Weight can fluctuate from day to day from various things so after today I am going to record only once a week, every Sunday and get a measuring tape so I can measure my neck, waist and hip.

After looking at my BMI, I decided that 140 would be a reasonable weight; its dab in the middle, not high and not low so I don’t have to worry about gaining a few pounds making me overweight or losing a few pounds to make me underweight.  At 140 lbs I felt it is a good weight with some flexibility on both sides.  My BMR was set to eating 1600 calories a day 🙁

I don’t think I have ever eaten 1600 calories of healthy food in my life.  The generic set minimum for women my age and height though is 1200 calories so I figured I’d start with that first and then work my way up to 1600 calories.

The first thing I did was setup and commit to a daily exercise schedule which I set to walking 2 miles a day because I know it was something I could do without whining about it.  For someone who has not exercised in probably a decade if not more, believe me, it’s easy to whine about it.  So every morning I get up and walk fast pace (2.5 mph) for one mile before the sun gets too high in the sky and it gets too hot.  I wasn’t quite sure how fast I was walking or how far a mile was, so I used an app from Google called My Tracks.  Google My Tracks uses your phone’s internal GPS to calculate how fast you are going and what distance you have traveled via on foot, bike or vehicle, and then records it to your Android phone.  Epic app.  So every time I exercise, I take my phone with me (which almost everyone probably does anyway), turn on my favorite music, mostly techno or some soca or calypso, Björk, Rasputina and walk a mile.  I was happy to find that walking in a complete square from the back of my complex to the front and back home was a mile’s walk.

The second thing I did was use My Fitness Pal Diary to calculate my water, calorie, carbs, fat, protein and sodium everyday and made sure I didn’t go over those numbers.  This is what the MFP Diary looks like. And I do this everyday. I try to eat 1200 calories a day and stay within my limits while exercising 2 times a day and trying to consume 8 cups of water a day.

 

First thing’s first, I had to find something to monitor what I’m eating.  My weight gain was essentially just from eating more than I should (a.k.a. overeating) and not exercising.  Instead of eating just a couple slices of pizza, I would sit at my computer for hours playing World of Warcraft and eat the whole damn pizza.  Not even kidding.  Instead of getting up and cooking a meal, I would eat out at chinese restaurants, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Pizza Hut, Papa John’s, Taco Bell, Rally’s, KFC, Burger King and Captain D’s pretty much for every meal which was lunch and dinner because I don’t eat a breakfast.  It took some time for all that to add up, probably about 6 years, but a few years from bad eating habits will make you one day wake up and look in the mirror and be surprised that you’re fat.  I have never tried to lose weight before so I didn’t really know where to start.  So I thought to myself, you’re a nerd techie girl and you already know there’s pretty much an app for everything.  There’s gotta be an app for this!  So I went on my Android phone and did a search for a calorie calculator. The first thing that came up was an app called My Fitness Pal.  I looked over the app and found it looked pretty solid (although I didn’t really know what I was looking at).  But then it said it had a web site too. Orly now?  So I go to the web site and was amazed at what I saw, a completely FREE interface with an extremely large, active and responsive community. GTFO.

Now that I found an app to monitor my food intake, I started looking up some health steps to weight loss. The first thing was to find out my BMR and BMI.  Nowbeit online you can only find estimates because many other factors go into it so the real answer would come from your doctor, however I figure the bottom line is I am overweight and I know it so the online charts won’t be too far from the truth.

After clicking “Calculate” it gave me my estimate:

Next I calculated my BMI:

Calculation?

Congrats! I’m OBESE!  It’s only 2 lbs over but still, obese is obese and I’m there.  Not good.  I’ve never tipped the scales at 200 lbs, the closest I ever came was 198 lbs, and I’m not trying to go there.  Ever. Now it’s time for action!

 

A few days ago I stepped on my scale and found I was 193 lbs. I have never been this heavy in my life!  The weight didn’t just creep up on me either.  I was completely aware of my weight gain from 140 lbs but I simply got comfortable with my get up, go to work, sit at my desk all day, come home and sit at another desk all night and game life, that I essentially just did nothing about it; that was until my feet started to swell when sitting down and waking up with pins and needles feelings in my arms in the middle of the night if I slept with my arm bent.  That led to me trying to sleep splayed out like a starfish. Uncool.  Even then I kept putting it off until I went to Chicago a couple weeks ago and when I got back, I looked at my pictures and thought to myself, my god I look so chunky!

 It was at that point I said to myself I had had enough and dedicated myself to losing 53 lbs to get back down to my 140 lbs.  This is my story about my weight loss challenge.