One Month Complete

Well, here we are one month later. The wife & I are feeling better than we have in a long time. With the introduction of an exercise program and a nutritional plan that will follow us long after we achieve our target weight goals.

So first in 30 days, I am happy to say that I have lost 7% of my starting body weight and the wife has lost 5.2% of her starting weight, which is well about our 1 month goal of 2.5% & 3.1% respectively. We are very proud of ourselves and while we still have trouble seeing the actual results - we are starting to feel it with looser clothing and smaller appetites.

I am not an opponent or proponent of any other diet program, but I wanted to share our thoughts on why we chose the plan we're on. So with everything out there in the diet industry we were most concerned about long-term change. While our short-term goal (the next 12 months) our goal is to achieve our target weight - after that, our goal is to maintain the weight. So we felt that programs where you have to buy their food (Jenny Craig & Nutri-System) would not teach us how to cook meals for ourselves - plus it's rather expensive. Our research led us to looking at diets that cut out carbs or fat, and how dangerous they are to completely eliminate those energy sources. Plus that is only good for the initial plan, our bodies need fat & carbs to maintain.

So we decided on the biggest loser nutritional plan as it keeps things very simple - 6 small meals rather than 3 big meals. Each meal is measured for calorie content - what's nice about this is that it only takes us a few times measuring it out before we can spot a real serving size. At first it was a bit shocking to see how small the serving was compared to my usual serving. I can't imagine how many calories I used to consume before I started counting calories. If I had thought about it - I would've measured the week before I started my new plan just to see the difference. If I had to guess, I probably consumed 5000-6000 calories a day and now I'm consuming around 1200-1500 a day and surprisingly I'm not hungry. It was harder at first, but I just filled up on water, now it's not as easy to drink that much water.

We read that in order to lose weight you must either consume 3,500 fewer calories per week (500/day) or burn them off through exercise. Our exercise routine is burning off about 400-800 calories per day plus we are eating fewer calories is really working for us AND we feel that this will be rather easy to continue without too much effort.

According to the Biggest Loser Book, the formula to determine the maximum calories to consume for weight loss is calculated by multiplying your current weight by 7. Thus as we lose weight our maximum intake for weight loss continues to drop. The once we've achieved the goal - our plan will be to maintain a 2,000 calorie diet along with exercise. But we still have 12 short months before then. Stay tuned. :)