Numbers Game

It is starting to slowly click in my head that losing weight is a numbers game. I hate numbers, but here they are.



To lose 1 pound of fat, a person must burn 3500 calories more than they've taken in.

To lose a pound a week, this translates to 500 calories per day, which can be broken down into whatever combination of diet and exercise desired (e.g. 250 calories more exercise and 250 calories less food... or 500 calories more exercise, eating the same).

If I weigh 185 pounds right now (this is an estimate - I haven't weighed myself in a few days), and I want to weigh 120, I must lose 65 pounds, which is 227,500 calories.

That is a lot of calories.

To do this with exercise alone, I'd have to burn 500 extra calories every day. Given that most of my work-outs average around 400-450, this isn't totally impossible... but I haven't been exercising 7 days (or times) a week.

I also haven't exactly been going easy on the food and drink, which will definitely slow this whole process.

Assuming I am actually able to lose a pound a week (with redoubled efforts), then it would take me 65 weeks to meet my goal. That is 16 months, 1 week, if there were no failures or slip-ups. More than a year.

I've read in many places that it is unwise to try to lose more than 30 pounds at a time, so I am trying to lose all the weight that I want to in two installments: lose 30, maintain, lose another 30.



To be honest, I would be pretty happy to weigh 155 pounds, but to have a healthy BMI at 5'4", I should be somewhere in the 110-140 range. If I weigh 120, my BMI would be 20.5. Calculating my current BMI was scary, since I am once again obese at 31.8.

It's been so long since I weighed 120 pounds that I can't even imagine what it would look like, but I intend to stick at this diet and exercise thing until I see. This is going to be a very long road, but I know that I need to make major life changes if I want to be healthy.

Losing weight isn't a mystical process or something for which I must be morally superior to others: it is a practice of crunching the numbers and coming up with a net loss of 500 calories (or more) per day.