For most of my adult life, I’ve been within 5 pounds of weighing 150 pounds. At 5 foot 3, that’s in the overweight section of a BMI chart. I’ve weighed more, especially during my first marriage, and when I bulked up to do a Spartan Race. I’ve weighed less very rarely; one time when I was running nearly every day I dropped weight, but I didn’t own a scale at that time, so I’m not sure how much. Another time I managed to dip down a bit with a 30 day diet challenge, but those results didn’t last.
And now, I’m trying something that the old me would have called impossible. I’m doing calorie counting, and I’m not miserable. I’m not hungry all the time. I am, at times, struggling to eat enough to support running and CrossFit. I had no idea calorie counting could be like this.
Not that it isn’t a pain in the butt to record every damn thing that I eat. Oh and don’t get me started on the annoyances of weighing out food to make sure my portions are correct. But I’ve been doing this for nearly two months now, and it’s been doable and I’m losing weight.
And while the pounds are taking their time to leave, I can see differences in my body composition, in addition to the small actual weight loss so far. I’m planning on trying to get my weight down to 140 and then re-evaluating. I might try to go lower at that point, or I might try and stay there. I mean, I’ve gotten there before and couldn’t maintain it, so if I can get there, staying there might be challenge enough.
I’m hoping that the weight loss will help me do better on body weight movements in CrossFit, specifically pull ups. I’ve got the strength for pull ups, but I figure if I can manage to lose some of my extra padding without losing that muscle, then I should “magically” be able to do more and better pull ups. And so far, I’m even seeing some improvement with those, but it’s nothing to write home about, yet.
I think one of the big reasons that I couldn’t have done this before is that I used to eat crap. Not literally, but I now consider most fast food to be food that I don’t want in my body. Along with junk food. I wouldn’t have been able to just cut those out for the sake of weight loss, but I had already cut those foods mostly out of my diet for my digestive issues. So calorie counting at this point wasn’t about restricting foods, because I’d already done that. It was just about counting what I was consuming.
And it doesn’t hurt that my husband and I are in this together. It’s super hard to make a dietary change when you live with someone who is not making those changes. It has been hard, even with us calorie counting together, because there are some foods that are great for weight loss that I just can’t eat. Like popcorn. Oh, do I get jealous when that air popper starts perfuming the air with that delightful scent.
But the drawbacks are outweighed by the support that we’re able to give each other. We’re both learning more about the caloric content of various foods, and we also talk about how we react to various foods. It’s not just about calories for us, but also watching sodium intake (minimizing) and protein intake (maximizing).
I don’t know where this particular journey is going to lead me, but I’m glad that I’m on this path. And grateful that I’m not walking it alone.