Calorie Nazi Status Report

It's been one week since I adopted the Calorie Nazi software.

The first few days, as y'all know, were just awful. I was hungry and crabby and had a migraine almost every day (not definitively related, but suspicious).

But the more data you feed it the more it tweaks your caloric budget, and to my utter relief it decided pretty quickly I needed to eat more. By yesterday it was giving me nearly 300 a day more than when I started. So much so that, if I make good choices during the day I can even have a little bit of sour cream on my roasted potato at dinner and sometimes have a cookie or little bit of ice cream for an evening snack.

Long story short, in this first week I lost 3.5 pounds!

This isn't the first time I've done this (counting calories, not the software) so the old habits came back pretty easily - choosing high-quality, low cal foods to feel full instead of going for the quick and easy calorie bomb for lunch, etc. But with the software there's an element of accuracy I never had before, due almost entirely to the recipe function. It also keeps me honest - for some reason it was easy for me to lie to myself when I used to do this on paper but I can't lie to the Calorie Nazi.

The goal I selected is based on me losing about 85 pounds in the next 23 months - less than a pound a week. The software rates this effort as "fairly easy" and I'm starting to believe it. Obviously I had the typical first week water weight loss thing (fleeting but still motivational). I don't even want to try to lose more than a pound a week, because (to beat the dead horse) this is about sustainability, and to me dropping 1000 calories a day for a 2-a-week loss is not even in the ballpark of sustainable.

Keeping in mind I want to keep this manageable so I don't go postal and hold hostages to exchange for Ben & Jerry's, with the increase in my budget I'm also aware that I've suddenly got some breathing room I didn't have before. So rather than revel in the extra ice cream for the next year I pushed the goal date back from 12/31/2008 to 9/30/2008.

The effort is still rated as manageable - fairly easy and the calorie recommendation is still doable. For example, if I do even a moderate workout on a given day I'll be allowed to eat around 2200 calories - not bad, right? BTW, I picked that date because it's right before my 10th anniversary. I figured the best thing I could give my husband for that anniversary is me looking like I did when we met.

I can't possibly be perfect for the next 18 months (for example, I'm already giving myself a free pass for the day of our Super Bowl party), but for whatever reason right now I'm more optimistic than I have ever been. Probably because what I'm eating hasn't really needed to change much - the real eye opener has been how many calories I was eating without realizing it, generally when snacking on stuff like yogurt or a handful of walnuts while I was preparing meals. Just being conscious of this and drinking a big glass of water to replace the pre-meal snacking seems to be the key for me, at least until I reach the next "omg I can only eat HOW MUCH at this weight?" plateau.

I honestly thought it would take me another 5-10 years to lose the rest of this weight, so to have something telling me that I can do it by next year, and for it to feel this simple and doable, is nothing short of miraculous. I've resisted counting calories for the obvious reason that it is (to quote Veeg) The Suck. But I realized over the last couple months, as I've watched my weight creep back up by 5 pounds, that my shoulder injury had reduced my training to the point I was no longer working off enough to eat like I was used to. So I decided, considering I might need a surgery that will remove me from training for weeks, possibly months, that if there was ever a time to get a handle on calorie counting it was right now.

OK, so enough gushing about the obligatory first week's extra lost poundage. Let's see how I feel about it in another week.