Talking It Off

I’m now losing my last 10 pounds and I find myself buying into the idea that my body knows it too and that it has somehow decided to be difficult about letting it go.

The reality is that my body has no idea how much more weight I intend to lose.  It has no opinion on whether it will let go of 10 pounds or 20 or even 30 more pounds.  If it worked like that, people would never starve to death – but they do every day.  Our bodies drop weight when we eat fewer calories than we need to maintain our current body weight.

So why is it more difficult to lose the “last” ten pounds?

The fact is that I now weight almost 24 pounds less than I did when I started so my body needs fewer calories just to maintain this weight, never mind lose more.   It feels like I have to eat less and less in order to lose because I DO need to eat less and less in order to lose.  Because I still have the same nutritional requirements, I still need to eat about 1400 calories per day in order to be healthy.  So, if I want to lose at the same rate as I did 25 pounds ago, I need to move more on a daily basis.  It’s a stark choice and I often choose not to move so much so I lose slowly.

One of my favourite procrastination routines is to mess about with various online calculators and one of the best sites for weight loss calculators is Calories Per Hour.  It has a great explanation of basal and resting metabolic rates – well worth a read.  This is also the site I use to calculate how much I’m really burning while I’m exercising.  None of these things is exact but I’m far less likely to manipulate these calculations than WW Points, especially for exercise.

So – having messed about with calculators for a while, it looks like my 140 lb body will need around 200 calories less per day than my 170lb body.  OR, I have to burn those calories off through exercise if I want to eat as much as I used to.

It’s not as though I haven’t heard that before but I’ve certainly never believed it as true for me.  Hmmm.  Must remember this post when I’m struggling with maintenance.