I wish I could look like this …
WARNING: This is going to be a SUPER long post … ^^;;
Alright; so I have been MIA for quite some time … And I admit, it’s because I got a little depressed, and I was kinda slugging it around, not really wanting to get out of my own way … You get the idea. I won’t bore you with all the gore-y details, but I will say that I haven’t been myself for a while – I’ve been in a rut, even before I became a Vegan and started this blog; I thought that changing my eating habits and being more healthy would help me get out of it … And it sort of did for a little while – superficially at least. However, what I thought was me getting better really wasn’t – it was just me throwing myself at something new and exciting, and hoping that that was the cure …
So I sat down one day, about eight weeks ago, (well after my last blog post, I know) and thought to myself – Raeynn, what is the matter with you? Why are you so unhappy?
And I said to myself, Beau, I think it’s the fact that I’m so overweight. In fact, I think it’s always been at least in part the fact that I’m so damned overweight …
But this was a special case. As far as I am aware, I have never, ever weighed over 200lbs; in fact, in high school, which was really the last time I had regular access to a scale, I weighed somewhere around 183lbs pretty consistently. Well, I started a new part-time job, and one of the things I had to do before I could officially go to work was get a physical – and that included recording my height and weight. I was pleasantly surprised to be categorized another quarter inch or so taller than I had previously supposed myself to be … But my weight.
212lbs.
I almost fell off of the scale when I saw that.
So, as I have in the past, I decided that I was going to try that whole loosing weight thing – I looked up what the internet said I should be eating to lose weight, which the consensus seemed to be between 10-12x my body weight. Alright; easy enough.
212lbs x 10-12 = 2120-2544 calories
Fine; now that I had my number, I figured I would just figure out how many calories I eat in a day, and I would adjust accordingly. What I found out shocked me.
Do you know how hard it is to eat even 2000 calories in one day on a vegan diet?
Alright; let me re-phrase that. Do you know how hard it would be for me to eat even just 2000 calories on a vegan diet?
Put it this way; after I clocked calories for two or three days, I was at an average of 800 calories/day – one day I even got up to 1000. Which is drastically less than I thought I was supposed to be eating, and I didn’t know how I was going to eat that many calories in a day – I always eat when I’m hungry, no earlier and no later, and I eat a serving of whatever I’m eating, which always makes me full for a couple hours, which is what it’s supposed to do …
So for a while, I was stopping at Chipotle to make up my calories, and even added a little cheese and/or sour cream to a burrito in order to get a little more bang for my buck. Not only did this make me sick, but eating a whole Chipotle burrito in one sitting is brutal on my digestive tract anyway – not to mention that at almost $10 a pop, it was eating a whole in my already very tiny wallet very quickly. Add forcing myself to bike at least 7 miles/day, and it was just really stressful trying to make up all the calories I was supposed to eat – not to mention actually COUNTING all of them, keeping lists, adding and subtracting … Long story short I hated it. However, I did loose 12lbs in about a month or so, which is about right on target for me, so that was exciting.
However.
All of the added stress due to the means in my mind weren’t justified by the end.
And then, I got my new phone – A SMART PHONE! ::cue angelic chorus here::
It’s probably the crappiest android on the market, but it goes online and has apps and all of this magical stuff, so I am happy xD And, speaking of apps, there was one that was completely and utterly my life saver. A little app with a corresponding website called My Fitness Pal (click there to go to the website).
This little thing is absolutely AMAZING! You start off telling it your weight, which at that point for me was 200lbs, and then you tell it how much weight you want to lose (in my case, about 80lbs, but that’s being optimistic I think, even though that’s what I told it) and then you tell it about how many lbs/week you want to lose – anywhere from half a pound to 2.5lbs if I remember correctly. I told it 2.5 – I want this flab gone! Then, it tells you how many calories/day you should try to eat, and it tells you how much exercise you should do/day. In my case it told me to eat 1200 calories (which is the lowest amount of calories you should eat, because if you eat less than that your body goes into starvation mode and you actually stop loosing weight) and I should exercise between 30-45min/day.
Needless to say, going from 800 calories/day to 1200 calories/day was a lot easier than trying to triple my caloric intake and not be sick constantly.
Also, this little thing is really convenient to use, because I can just update what I’m eating for Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, or a Snack from my phone, and a lot of my food items are already entered into the database, so I don’t have to figure out the calories or anything! It’s also a great little motivator – it posts messages like “[Your Name] has logged in for 5 days in a row!” and it seems all happy and excited about it. And when you come in under your caloric intake (which is easy if you exercise but still only eat around 1200 calories, because it adds the calories you burned to the calories you’re allowed to eat for that day) it posts a message that “[Your Name] came in under [his/her] calorie goal for the day!”
I dunno; something about those little messages always makes me really happy – it’s not like it’s telling you ‘come on, you can eat less calories’, but … It’s like a passive motivator instead of an active one? I guess? Whatever; either way, it really motivates me to eat less calories and log in every day to track my calories.
In the month that I’ve been using My Fitness Pal, I’ve lost another 13lbs, bringing my total weight down to 187.5lbs, and my weight loss up to 25lbs! 🙂 Also, in keeping with my fitness strategy, I have gotten myself 2 presents – one for losing 10lbs, and one for losing 25lbs. Actually, technically it’s 2 for losing 25lbs, but … Well, I don’t really count one of those two.
Also, now that I’m down 25lbs, I decided that I wanted some muscle definition to go along with my slim-ness, instead of just being skinny … I still want to look like I could kick your butt and take names later if I wanted to (though right now that’s just because if I sat on you you might die …), so I got something else that hopefully will accomplish this for me.
Tap Out XT.
Stay tuned for another blog post on that – this one’s already waaaaay too long, but I just finished the first work out of the set, and let me tell you, it’s going to be a rough 90 days … Aaaand, stay tuned for the results of my baking a vegan Chocolate Peanut Butter Fudge Cake and bringing it to work – without telling my co workers it was vegan!
‘Till next time!
– RaeynnBeau
Twice Boiled Cabbage 