I am alive... + Elf4Health

... but extremely busy. That's why I've been M.I.A. This is a busy time of year for me and I'm trying my hardest to just stay afloat... I still can't believe that it's been almost a month since I've written. Crazy!!!

I went back to Curves a couple of weeks ago. I haven't had much success yet, but this is only the third week. There are new owners and they changed their hours of operation so I'm unable to go as much as I liked to. Pretty much I can only go on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Tuesdays is Zumba and, while I love it, I need to get used to doing a plain Curves workout before I start Zumba. My knees are already killing me without doing Zumba. They decided to close on Fridays at 1 as well so I can't go on Fridays anymore. They are open on Saturdays from 8 to noon, but I'm rarely up early enough to go. *shrugs* Because of this schedule, the first week I made it two days and last week I only made it 1. I'm hoping that this week I can make it both available days (Monday and Wednesday as they're closed Thursday and Friday for Thanksgiving).

I've been thinking a lot about my diet. After being treated for the compulsive overeating, I don't binge anymore, but I am definitely addicted to the unhealthy foods. I would rather eat everything unhealthy than anything healthy. It's going to be a struggle, but I have an idea... According to a BMR calculator, my BMR is 1870. This means, when I don't work out at all, I need 2245 calories per day to maintain my current weight. If I work out at Curves three days a week, I would need 2572 calories per day to maintain my current weight. Since I don't want to maintain, but I do want to lose, I have to subtract a certain number of calories per day. To do this, I take my current weight (245.0) and subtract my goal weight (150.0) which is 95.0 pounds. It takes 3500 calories burned to lose one pound. So if I take 95 pounds and multiply it by 3500 calories, I get 332,500 calories that I need to burn. My ultimate goal is to hit my goal weight of 150.0 pounds by my 30th birthday. This is in 335 days. This means, I would need to cut 993 calories per day from my diet in order to meet my goal. If I don't work out at all, I would need to consume 1252 calories per day to meet my goal. If I work out at Curves three times a week, I would need to consume 1579 calories per day to meet my goal.

Here's where my new plan comes into play. One of my good friends told me her new outlook at dieting and, ya know what, I kind of like it. Here's how it works. You decide what you want your goal calorie intake to be each day. To determine mine, I am taking my workout goal of 1579 adding my non-workout goal of 1252 and dividing by two to get 1415. This is my goal calorie intake each day. There are 7 days in a week so I will multiply that by 7 and get 9905 calories. That is my goal WEEKLY calorie intake. Now, I'm going to look at this from a fun perspective. Let's say, Monday through Friday I only consume 1250 calories each day. 1250 x 5 = 6250. This leaves me with a total of 3655 calories. This means that over the weekend I could consume 3655 calories total which brings my daily allotment each day to 1827 calories. This will allow me for "cheat days" without feeling bad about them. For some reason, this REALLY makes sense in my mind. So, this is my goal from now on...

Last year I participated in the Elf4Health challenge. I say participated, but I didn't really do much of it. I conversed with my buddy and that's about it. There is a daily list of challenges for the four week period (see below). This year I'm hoping to actually complete all of the challenges. Today is starting out as a doozy. I'm not a big meat eater to begin with so I figured that this would be an easy challenge. Here was my menu for today:


- Breakfast: 3/4 cup dry vanilla Chex cereal
- Morning Snack: Belvita blueberry crackers
- Lunch: egg bagel with veggie cream cheese
- Afternoon Snack: sliced fuji apple
- Dinner: large salad with hard-boiled egg, cheese, lots of veggies, croutons, and light dressing
- Dessert: small sundae cone

So, it sounds like a pretty good day... except I started my day with coffee which sometimes hits me weird. It's not all the time, just sometimes, which I don't understand. I've only eaten about half of my cereal. I didn't even drink all of my coffee. It was one cup of coffee with half a cup of skim milk and a tablespoon of sugar. I drank about a third of it and I'm feeling very weir. Shaky, nauseous, light headed... I tried to jump straight into my lunch, but my cream cheese is watery. I'm not sure if it's bad or not, but being that I'm nauseous, I lost my appetite when I saw it. It's brand new and has an expiration date of early February so I'm not sure why it would be spoiled, but it was watery and usually they aren't... So now I'm not sure what to eat. I didn't bring anything else. I had a package of crackers in my desk so I've eaten a couple of those. I'll probably find something to eat when I'm home for lunch.

If you want to sign up, you can! You won't get a buddy until the final two weeks of the challenge, but you can still participate in the daily challenges. Just check out Lindsay's blog entry over at the Lean Green Bean.