Weight Loss Update...

I've been doing my diet pretty well. I've been working out pretty well.

The only problem?? I seem to have hit a plateau at right about 15 pounds lost.

So I've been doing some reading, and it would appear that I actually wasn't eating ENOUGH food. Odd that you can be trying to lose weight and not eat enough???

Well, I was down around 1400 calories or so everyday. The thing is, to maintain my weight I would need to take in about 3300 calories everyday. To lose weight at a healthy rate of around 2 pounds per week, you should take in only about 20% less calories everyday. So I should have been somewhere around 2500 calories per day give or take.

Basically, what happens is your body goes into almost like a starvation mode when you drastically cut calories all of the sudden. It thinks that you are not going to be getting enough food and it ends up storing as much of the food that you eat as possible.

This does a couple of things...first off, it makes it really difficult to burn fat, even if you're working out. Second, it makes it so that your body won't build muscle the way it's supposed to...which is 50% of my workout routine.

So I've started eating more. I'm trying to get between 1800 and 1900 calories per day. I found a few health websites that suggested that I eat right around that amount of food in order to lose 25 pounds over the next 10 weeks.

What's crazy?? It's HARD to eat another 600 calories when you're eating healthy things. I had tilapia tonight, and each filet was only 80 calories. So to get an extra 600 calories, just to put this into perspective, I would have had to eat about 8 of those filets. I'll be trying to get an extra snack or two during the day to get me closer to my goal of calories.

As far as working out?? I've been keeping it up, but tonight I'm disappointed in myself. I was really tired all day at work from not sleeping well last night, and today I skipped my workout for the first time since I started. I hope it doesn't negatively impact my routine at all. I also have been swapping out the sweat cardio workout every now and then with 30 minutes on the exercise bike. I feel that this isn't a bad thing, because I feel like I'm getting about the same type of workout, and it keeps things fresh...instead of doing the same 35 minute cardio routine every other day, I now throw the bike in every now and then to give me some other options. I'll also think about possibly throwing some paddle boarding in.

Overall, I'm still doing pretty well, I think, but I'm getting a bit frustrated with the plateau that I seem to be stuck on.