Diet Choices

Hello friends! Luckily enough for you, I had to stay home from work today with a sore throat, headache, and icky congestion; needless to add {but I will anyways} I did not workout today! but so far I have been good and stayed under my calorie goal so far. I did tell the hubby to return from class with something cool and icy to drink; hopefully that will not be a milkshake and will at least have a decent amount of nutritional value {like frozen lemonade or a smoothie; brilliant idea, if you have a blender, make Crystal Light Lemonade and then blend with ice! Sadly, I don't have a blender.}.

To get to the main purpose of my post today, I must divert my attention. I was chatting on Mama Laughlin's Fit Camp on Facebook {again, I know} about how I missed eating "real food"; now I know that salads and straight proteins are real food, but I did miss things like pasta, chocolate, potatoes, etc.One of the gals there suggested I try this calorie calculator instead of automatically taking the 1200 calories from MFP to see what I really needed. I put in my information and this is what happened:

It was a great idea, and let me explain that to you a little bit. The BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) is the approximate amount {remember, this is not an exact science and everyone is a little bit different} of calories you would burn if you did pretty much nothing all day {like I did today, being sick and all} and you would neither gain nor lose weight. The TDEE {and I don't know what that stands for, sorry} is fairly self explanatory in that it says, "daily calories to maintain weight" in other words, if you do not want to gain or lose weight it that many calories a day. Now my goal, which was chosen in step 6, was to lose weight at 20% this was on the higher end of percentage options and I figured it was a good {dare I say safe} percentage to work for personally. Now my goal is to never go over my TDEE and ideally not to go over my "goal" though I truly shoot for my BMR and I of course workout and do not eat more calories to compensate for what I burned in exercising {like MFP provides for you to be able to do}.

In short, following a model similar to this approach will make it easier to make wise food choices once you reach your goal weight and your less likely to make your body think that you are starving yourself and it will not be as eager to hang on to the calories you eat and store it as fat.