For the plan that I'm sketching out, I started with not having a calorie limit. I wanted simply to reduce my appetite. I found that to be extemely difficult to maintain losing weight though -- I would just plateau gaining and losing 2-4 pounds week after week.
So I decided I needed to have a calorie limit and toyed with the numbers 1500 or 1800 because it would be easy to follow.
But I remember learning how during WW2 in Britain everyone was on food stamps from 1939 - 1954, and there were still many food shortages through the 1970s. When I figured out the number of calories one would be eating if they were able to get all of their food rations each week, it averaged out to be 1200 calories per day.
I remember another WW2 story of a woman in Italy who held up her fist and said "one fistful of food a day, that's all you need to survive." A fistful it turns out, is the same size of what the stomach can comfortably hold.
So I came up with the notion that if I want to weigh 120 pounds eventually, I'll have to limit the number of calories I eat per day. The most important factor to figuring out how many calories I need to eat to maintain a certain weight is the BMR - Basal Metabolic Rate Calculator.
When I put in my height, desired weight of 120 pounds, age and gender, the calculator tells me I need to eat 1243 calories per day to maintain that weight without any exercise.
So that has become my daily target. To train myself to eat approximately 1200 calories per day, in an effort to get myself used to eating that much food, to learning what I need to do to meet that goal each day.
Wish me luck.
So I decided I needed to have a calorie limit and toyed with the numbers 1500 or 1800 because it would be easy to follow.
But I remember learning how during WW2 in Britain everyone was on food stamps from 1939 - 1954, and there were still many food shortages through the 1970s. When I figured out the number of calories one would be eating if they were able to get all of their food rations each week, it averaged out to be 1200 calories per day.
I remember another WW2 story of a woman in Italy who held up her fist and said "one fistful of food a day, that's all you need to survive." A fistful it turns out, is the same size of what the stomach can comfortably hold.
So I came up with the notion that if I want to weigh 120 pounds eventually, I'll have to limit the number of calories I eat per day. The most important factor to figuring out how many calories I need to eat to maintain a certain weight is the BMR - Basal Metabolic Rate Calculator.
When I put in my height, desired weight of 120 pounds, age and gender, the calculator tells me I need to eat 1243 calories per day to maintain that weight without any exercise.
So that has become my daily target. To train myself to eat approximately 1200 calories per day, in an effort to get myself used to eating that much food, to learning what I need to do to meet that goal each day.
Wish me luck.
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