Ten Pounds!

As of yesterday, I'm officially ten pounds lighter than I was when I started counting calories!  Hooray!

I'm in my fourth week of the calorie count, and I still don't quite feel ready to abandon counting calories yet.  I'm more excited about the rate of weight loss than I am bugged by logging everything that I eat.  I'll continue to be really strict in my counting and I'll continue to stick to my daily allotment of calories and I should continue to lose!

Speaking of my daily allotment of calories, now that I'm ten pounds lighter, my allotment has dropped by about 50 calories.  What??  No fair!  However, it does make sense.  There is less of me to maintain.

I can't really see the weight loss yet.  That will come in about 10-15 more pounds.  My wife says she can see it and I am noticing that my clothes (especially my pants) are fitting looser, so I'm seeing the progress.  It's just not very visual yet.

But I FEEL a lot better, mostly because the upward trend in my weight has been reversed.

I also feel much better knowing that I have found something that both works for me and is something I can continue to do all my life.  It takes a little bit of time and a lot of willpower.  It doesn't mean any special diet that I'm eventually going to go off of and gain my weight back.  It doesn't mean that I have to stop eating any of the foods that I love--I just have to keep track of the calories of the foods that I love, and eat less of them.  I am avoiding a couple of things right now, because as much as I love them, I wouldn't be able to fit them in my current calorie plan.  But I'm not swearing off of them for life--just until I get to the point that I'm maintaining my weight loss and I will have a larger calorie allotment each day.

I have been thinking about maintenance already.  When I hit my target weight, I'll count calories for a month or so--until I better understand how much a 190-lb me can eat and not gain weight--and then I'll stop calorie counting.  But I also have a "trigger" weight (200 lbs) where I have to start counting calories again, like it or not.  This way, I have a plan to keep the weight from slowly creeping back on until I have to do something more drastic again.

And yes, I'm going to celebrate ten pounds of weight loss, and I'm going to celebrate it with food.  I'm going to smoke a turkey tomorrow.