Question du jour

First, thanks for all your comments and congratulatory notes, about the 5K and about yesterday's weigh-in. You keep me running! (You're welcome for that earworm.)

In yesterday's comments, Hils asked:

It sounds like you are one of the paleo people who also keeps track of calories--and I was wondering, how did you figure out what level to keep your calories at while eating paleo? Thanks! 

First, are there other paleo people who track calories? I'd love to be reading their blogs. Do let me know of any. Thanks!

I've been using LoseIt! to track my food since the spring of 2012. I haven't logged every bite, every day, but have been pretty consistent with it, and have been religious about it this year. Having the app on my phone really makes it easy to add items throughout the day.

Just ask my husband: He says the phone is attached to my body.

But I digress.

When you create your LoseIt! account, you set goals for both your weight and your rate of loss. If you'd like to end up weighing 140 and you want to lose two pounds a week, LoseIt! will calculate the number of calories you need to eat each day to make it happen, and will estimate when you can expect to see the magic number.

Sounds simple, doesn't it? What LoseIt! doesn't account for is the individual quirks inherent in each of our metabolisms. I ate at or below the recommended calorie level from January to March of this year and lost 7 pounds. At that time, my plan was to lose a pound a week. So I wasn't doing as well as the program predicted I would.

As noted in yesterday's numbers post (and Kitten, your comment cracked me UP!), I ended up GAINING 1.5 pounds in March. Enough was enough. At that point I was well and truly frustrated. I'd been faithfully counting calories and walking nearly three miles daily. AND I WAS GAINING WEIGHT!?!?!

Enter Whole30. I downloaded and read the free materials (I wasn't going to buy the book until I knew how I would tolerate the plan), went shopping and made the decision to continue following LoseIt!'s calorie recommendation.

Most primal/paleo folks don't count calories. Most primal/paleo folks have, um, more normal metabolisms than mine apparently is. Or maybe mine is normal under paleo conditions, but not while eating the Standard American Diet.

Whatever that is.

I thought I was eating healthfully last winter. I cooked from scratch, ate whole grains and healthy fats (but not too many!), used artificial sweeteners. My biggest treat was a McDonald's sugar-free French Vanilla iced coffee every once in a while – 120 calories for the large size.

I'm at a point where I would love to stop journaling my food, but I'm pretty compulsive about it, and plan to continue doing so at least until the end of this year. The calorie target right now is pretty low – 1149 per day. I honestly don't have any trouble staying below it, though, and am frequently well below it.

Here's the thing: Protein and fat are more filling than carbs. Doesn't matter what kind of carbs. Doesn't really matter what kind of protein and fat, either. My protein is largely animal-based, and my additional (other than what's in my bacon or chicken or ground beef) fats are mostly plant-based – olive and coconut oil, with an occasional pat of butter made from grass-fed cow's milk.

But who cares if one macronutrient is more filling than another if you graze all day?

And that's the biggest difference eating primally has made for me. I don't think about the next meal/snack/eating occasion as soon as I'm done with the last one. My bacon and eggs last all the way to dinner sometimes.

As both of you know, I'm now 62. Older people need fewer calories than you young whippersnappers do. 1149 might be way too low. But I'm satisfied, am rarely hungry (when I am, it seems to be at the appropriate time, i.e., when I wake up or if it's been several hours since my last meal) and I'm losing weight.

My big question is this, and if you have any experience with it – or if you know of a blogger who does – I'd love to have it answered:

Would I lose more if I ate more?

The BMR calculator over at Fat 2 Fit Radio suggests a moderately active 5'2" 62-year-old female with 40% body fat (I guessed at that number) who wants to lose 25 pounds should be eating 1925 calories per day.

Since we are all our own science experiments, the only way I'll know the answer is to do it.

But at this point, being in the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" camp, I'm pretty unwilling to try. 

So, Hils, aren't you sorry you asked? You got the War and Peace answer, when the Reader's Digest version would have sufficed: I'm following LoseIt's daily calorie target.

I'm really glad you asked, though. Obviously I need to keep thinking about the right answer. For me.

Ya wanna take it outside?

Sometimes, even when it's cold and even when I have a cool new piece of gym equipment, I need to walk outdoors. Yesterday was one of those days.

I waited until mid-afternoon, when – theoretically – the temperature had climbed to its peak for the day, and did four miles, rather effortlessly. It helps me a lot to take the Fat2Fit guys with me. No matter how many times I listen, I hear something new, or I hear something and realize I can apply it to my situation.

If you're new here, the Fat2Fit philosophy is to eat the number of calories daily you would need to maintain your goal weight, according to your BMR. There are tools on their website to help you calculate this number.

(I want to stop and give a shout out to Shauna, who directed me to the F2F podcast in the first place. Brilliant! Thank you!)

New Years (and, to a lesser extent, Mondays) offer such hope and promise for changing behaviors which have held one back. Speaking for myself, of course! Heh. I began implementing the F2F philosophy in late November, but allowed myself to indulge a bit more over the Christmas holidays. Before 1/1/11, though, I was back in the saddle.

The most difficult and challenging aspect of this philosophy (they don't prescribe a "diet") is eating enough. After a lifetime of reading (in magazines and books) and being told (by doctors and husband[s] that I should eat 1200 calories per day to shed lard, it's hard to make myself eat more. And, frankly, I'm not shedding lard, but from what I've learned that's to be expected when you go from starving yourself to feeding yourself. (1200 calories is what a hospital would feed a 7-year-old girl in a coma daily in order to keep her alive.)

I have every confidence that lard will be shed. If not, you'll be the first to know.

At any rate, I'm not adding lard and I'm eating much more than 1200 calories per day – 1700 to 1800 as a rule.

It's wonderful to eat a filling breakfast, a decent lunch, a satisfying dinner, a couple of snacks and not gain weight. When I was trying to limit my calories to 1200/day, I would eat part of my breakfast before my walk, finish it afterward and not eat again until dinner. I would be hungry all day, tempted by "bad" foods and take out my frustrations on those around me. I was rarely satisfied and I thought about food all the time.

Not any more. When I'm lusting for a high-calorie treat, I either fit it into the day's calories or decide the calories aren't worth the cost. Or I decide I'll have it later – later in the day, later in the week or later in my life.

It would be much more difficult to change my lifestyle were it not for the little food diary I loaded onto my BlackBerry. Keeping a food journal has been shown to be a major predictor of weight-loss success, and it's also one of the hardest good habits to establish. I use the FatSecret app, but there are many others available for all the smartphones out there.

Why am I rambling about all of this today? I'm not sure. I don't feel like my enthusiasm is lagging, but maybe yours is. If so, I hope I've helped. It always helps me to realize that what I'm doing has benefits, that I'm working toward goals and that I'm more likely to reach them by taking it slow. I've done quick-and-dirty weight loss before. Just look where it got me.

Have you been tempted?

No, not by all the Thanksgiving leftovers (I have none! since we went out for dinner), but by all the sales, sales, SALES! Advertising bombs are going off everywhere you look, if you are even remotely "plugged in."

I'll admit I've clicked through to check prices on laptops, bedspreads and chairs, three things I'm looking for to add to my collection of stuff. Actually, the bedspread and chairs will be replacements for sadly worn-out stuff. We keep putting off replacing them because, well, just because.

The laptop, on the other hand, would be quite a luxury for me. I have a mini-mini-teeny-weeny laptop (the BlackBerry), and have decided that sometimes it's just too hard to do what I want to do on that two-inch screen. And I usually decide that instead of trudging over to the second-floor office in the garage, I'll just wait until later. And then I never do that thing I was going to do on the BlackBerry.

I'll be talking myself out of the laptop pretty soon. Who wants to bet?

Thanksgiving was the perfect day to begin the Great Calorie Experiment. According to this calculator (and thank you again, Shauna, for pointing me to their podcasts) here's the range of how much I should eat at different activity levels. I walk for more than an hour every day, but it's not what I would call 'hard exercise,' so I've put myself in the Moderately Active category.

 

I haven't even come close to eating that many calories on a daily basis. Thursday, Friday and Saturday I managed to eat around 1650 per day. Yesterday I didn't even make it to 1400. I had no idea it would be so hard to eat! That's never been my problem. Heh.

I'm going to keep at it, though, mostly because I have so much more energy! Yesterday, for example, was another hands-and-knees floor scrubbing, this time the hallways and kitchen. I moved furniture in the main living area and mopped all of that floor, as well. It took four hours from start to finish, no breaks, and then I walked four miles outdoors when I was done.

I can't do that eating 1200 calories or less per day. I'll admit I was pretty beat last night, but I'm almost 60 and that much activity probably should wear me out. I'm grateful I can even get down on my hands and knees; I know too many people younger than I who can't.

Weigh in is Wednesday, and I'm anxious to see what happens after the first week. My husband is very skeptical and only marginally supportive. Sometimes I feel like I have to sneak-eat, so he won't see me chowing down on that apple with peanut butter, for example, a couple hours before dinner.

That's another thing: I'm not eating crap to get those extra calories in. It's not difficult to eat healthful food in my house, because I don't buy crap. But I do have some baking supplies and it would be very easy to dig into that bag of Hershey's Kisses I bought to make Peanut Butter Blossoms, for example (nine Kisses are 200 calories). That doesn't seem like a good way to spend calories.

Hey! Who kidnapped the real Debbi, and when are you bringing her back? Heh.