Eating More, Feeling Better - My New Attitude Toward Food

I am eating more food now than I have in months.  It still feels odd.  After crunching all the numbers, I realized that I really wasn't getting enough nutrition for someone my size.  I hated to admit it, but I am not a normal-sized person.  At the beginning of this journey, I began eating the number of calories a 150 pound person should eat.  Like many of us, I subscribed to the "act like the person you want to be" theory.  Apparently, that's a fine and dandy idea if your current weight and goal weight are not terribly far apart.  But I still have over one hundred and fifty pounds to lose. (Okay, just saying that made me feel ashamed.  I'm working on that next.  That's a tough one.)  Someone as big as I am needs to have intermediate goals.  I need to achieve my weight loss in smaller steps.

Instead of eating like a person less than half my size, I need to make a few stops along the way.  My first step should be to eat like a person who weighs, say, 250 pounds.  If I eat to the basal metabolic rate (BMR) of a 250 pound person, I will still be eating enough to sustain a person my size.  The weight will come off, and I will still have energy and proper body functioning.  Then, when I get closer to that first goal, I can readjust my caloric intake downward.

What I find a bit unnerving is getting used to eating so much food and then having to trim it back once again when I reach my next goal weight.  But, I can do that.  My main goal is to be healthy, and if this is what I have to do to achieve my goal, I'll do it.  I will just be more aware and more flexible with what I eat.  I refuse to eat junk, so I am adding the extra calories by having extra fruit, protein, healthy fats and complex carbs.  An extra piece of fruit or two, some nuts, a little extra protein... It all adds up.  

Right now I am supposed to be eating around 2200 calories a day and eating back the calories I burn off.  According to all the experts, that is the right amount of food intake to support my current health as well as achieve goal of reaching 250 pounds.  How am I doing?  I am definitely not eating 2200 calories a day.  I do well to get to 1600.  Consider it a work in progress.  Instead of waiting until I hit 250 pounds to reassess, I will most likely reassess my BMR more often... every 20 pounds maybe.  That will allow me to keep shifting it downward in smaller increments instead of waiting.  The closer my actual BMR gets to 1600 the happier I will be!  Of course, I could get used to eating large quantities of food again.  Just kidding!

Who knew losing weight would be so difficult?  Exercising seems to be the easy part!

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FYI:

For those of you who are interested, I have set up a page of links to different nutritional calculators.  You'll find this page on the right hand side of the blog.  I do suggest you try several of them to see how they compare.  I ended up using the ones from Fat 2 Fit.

Update... I finally decided to use the actual formula for basal metabolic rate from Shapefit.com... And yes, I did the math myself.  I came up with a BMR based on my stats and calculated to lose 3 pounds per week. The number?  1450 calories per day.  This is the number I'm going to use for the next 25 pounds or so and then I will reassess.  I think I simply trusted my math more than any one calculator.  I am obsessed!