Yesterday, I ate like a maniac. We’re talking breakfast, lunch, a dinner I used the oven to make, and even a couple of snacky-type things in between. Total caloric intake: 1673. I think the 100+ ounces of water I poured down my throat satisfied the typical hunger cravings I usually have. 1673 calories and I was full from the time I woke up until the time I went to bed.

What’s significant about 1673 calories? I have no idea. I just know that every formula I could find on the internet says to maintain my body weight I should be consuming a total of 3000+ calories. Um, yeah, no thanks. The thought of that, now that I’m more aware of what I’m eating, makes me sick to my stomach.

In order to lose one pound of fat per week, I have to reduce my weekly calorie intake by 3,500 calories, which works out at five hundred calories per day. This equation makes it so easy for me to see that I can easily lose weight by eating like a normal human being and not a starving animal that throws anything even remotely resembling food into her mouth. Or alternately, I stop drinking 3 cans of pop per day (which I’ve done) and there go my extra 3500 calories. Scary, isn’t it?
To lose weight, I obviously have to burn off more calories than I shove in my mouth. That doesn’t mean I use the crosstrainer for two hours straight to work off that many calories. It means I burn at least 500 doing cardio, a couple more hundred doing weights, and then my normal daily activities of walking up and down the stairs five or six times a day at my apartment, walking my dog, and some general cleaning take care of the rest of the calories that my body doesn’t need to actually run.

So, logically and on paper, this whole diet and health thing makes a lot of sense. It’s the following through with it that could get tricky!