Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving was last Thursday and we traveled to my sister's house in Chesapeake for the holiday. Our family actually celebrated on Wednesdy because my husband had to get back here to work on Thursday! I did well with my calories and even walked a mile on the morning we celebrated Thanksgiving. I went over my calorie goal that one day by 800 calories, but I'm generally under my calories so I wasn't worried about it. 

The morning we left I weighed and was down to losing a total of 40 pounds. My body's natural rythm is to gain some pounds on the scale after a loss. That wasn't helped with the holiday in the middle, but the weight is back down to within one pound of what it was last week. I am happy with that. 

I have been on this journey so many times before and everytime I learn more things. Although I'm eating about 1500 to 1800 calories a day, I'm still not sure that's enough for my body. I have been doing a lot of research and I think I do burn a ton of calories...there is not a thing wrong with my metabolism, it's my eating that was broken and lack of movement!  I can fairly easily burn 1,000 calories on my weight lifting days. I usually spend about 90 minutes doing cardio and weight training in intervals. I find I like that and the cardio machine I like the best is the elliptical machine. It burns the most calories for me.

I recently found a website that calculates your calories burned during a day and then just subtract calories from that to know how much to eat to lose weight. According to that I should be eating way more calories than I am...I don't think I'm brave enough to eat that many, but I do think I'm going to up my caloric intake a few hundred calories. When I lost weight about 10 years ago I was very successful and ate 2200 calories a day!  People didn't believe me when I told them. Now, I'm not even sure that was enough with the exercise I was actually doing!

At my lowest weight 10 years ago (210 lbs.), I was only eating 1600 calories, but at the time I'm thinking of I was training for a triathlon so it wasn't uncommon for me to spend 3 or 4 hours in exercise...walking/running, biking, and swimming!  I probably burned that many calories in exercise so my body was not getting any fuel!  No wonder I wasn't losing anymore weight!

I want to be smart about my weight loss because I am 54 years old now and need to get this weight off and keep it off! I don't want to be skinny...I don't like skinny, actually!  LOL  I just want to be healthy! I need to remember that if 210 lbs and a size 10 dress is healthy, I need to be happy!  :)

Ten more pounds to the 50 pound mark and that will also be 1/4 of the weight I want to lose!  I will have to do what I've done three more times!  It's a breeze!