Weight Fluctuations – Fascinating!

The human body is an amazing thing. I’m really fascinated by how much it works. I’m having fun with my new electronic scale. I’m seeing how my weight changes from morning to evening (a 2-3 lb gain over the course of the day, usually). I’m seeing how drinking a pot of tea has no impact on my weight (not even by .2 lb!). Bowel movements (sorry, this may be TMI) don’t seem to have any impact on weight changes either! But yesterday I was really surprised.

I had an intense weekend of activity, burned 3800 calories, was outside a lot, probably needed to hydrate more, but tried my best to drink LOTs. Yesterday was a regular day. I had work, errands, and unfortunately forgot to eat my late afternoon snack. By the time I got hime, I was ravenous, always a danger. I got a bigger dinner than I should have, but it was still within my calories for the day. I drank 7 glasses of water during the day, not bad for me. I was up a few pounds by evening, according to the scale (as I expected). And this morning???

This morning I showed a 6 lb gain from yesterday morning. I increased my weight between before bed and after I woke up. That’s never happened before. Crazy, huh?

Anyway, I’m not concerned. I ate as I’m supposed to, maybe a little heavier in the evening, but still within acceptable limits. I wonder if my body is a sponge slurping up all the food/energy/water it can to make up for this weekend? That’s all I can guess at. I’m sure it’ll go back to normal amounts in a day or two. But it’s so wierd in the interrim.

 

 

Breaking it down: how I gained the weight

I love to analyze things. How did I manage to go from 208 lbs in September 2011 to 234 lbs in July 2012? I gained 26 pounds in basically 8 1/2 months. *HOW* did that happen? Well, it was like this:

1 lb = 3500 calories
26 lbs = 91,000 calories
91,000 calories / 8.5 months = 10,706 calories/months
10,706 calories/month / 31 days/month = 345 calories per day

Yes. I overate by 345 calories per day. That is how I gained so much weight in less than a year. That is was my normal morning coffee. That’s 3 pieces of chocolate out of the candy bowl in the office at work. Really. That’s it. That doesn’t seem so horrible. It’s also equal to 4-5 workouts at the gym per week (483-607 calories per workout).

Now that I’m calorie counting like a fiend, I thought I’d be brutally honest about what I previously ate, to see how it compared to now. I put in my typical meals, and let me tell you, it was very very realistic. Not including alcohol (of which I drank regular-like), and not counting exercise (for which I started doing weekly at the end of March, for about 900-2000 calories per weekend while being sedentary during the week), I was eating:

3312 calories a day

Holy crap that is high. So think about that! All I can think of is 91,000 calorie deficit needed to get back into my 208 fighting trim from September last year. Yeah, how long will that take me? If I lose 2 lbs a week, which is what I think I am on track to do (ignore my 6 lb loss this first week as beginner’s luck/an anomaly), it will take me 9 weeks, or about 2 to 2 1/2 months to get back to that weight. That’s the first week of October. That means I won’t be in the 100s (if I’m consistent, which hardly ever happens, not to be negative), until November – that’s after Halloween.

Yeah, I’ve got a long way to go. So give up that Starbucks habit if you want to lose some weight yourself. I’m going to go eat some cantaloupe now – all this talking about not eating is making me real hungry. Dietmaven out.