In my last post, I wrote about what calories are and how I set my goals. In that post I noted that a simple equation for caloric balance was:
Energy consumed – energy expended = energy balance
I wrote a bit about energy consumed but I didn’t say much about energy expended. We expend energy all the time. The video in my last post covers the topic in more detail but a quick explanation is that your body processes, such as breathing, burn the majority of energy you consume. You’d still need well-balanced meals even if you slept all day. You burn the rest processing the foods you eat and with your daily activity. The split usually goes something like 70% to bodily functions, 10% to digestive processes, and 20% to other activity. That other activity includes everything from reaching up to scratch your nose to running for 30 minutes.
Months before I started my journey, I had picked up a Fitbit. I never used it consistently and never monitored my caloric intake with it. But with my renewed drive, I strapped the device on and started tracking my steps. Fitbit’s default goal is 10,000 steps per day. This number, not surprisingly, seems to come from an advertising campaign that ran in Japan in the 60s. Advertising works.
MyFitnessPal allows the user to link their Fitbit data to their account, making it possible to track calories and activity in the same place. This is a valuable connection to make. People who are super active, say nurses, need to consume more energy than people like me who remain mostly sedentary during their daily lives.
On top of one’s daily activity is intentional exercise. And this is where I got into trouble. I figured out that I could consume the number of calories allotted by MyFitnessPal, sometimes less, and burn even more calories through exercise. Great!
Here are a few samples of my caloric intake during June and July of 2015 (total calories consumed not shown):
Going back to the energy equation, for the week in June, I was consuming 1,280 calories a day, which was 878 calories below my goal. For the week in July, I was consuming 1,406 calories per day, which was 889 calories below my goal. From there, I exercised until I dropped the number even lower, to 954 and 777 calories per day respectively.
I did not understand how dangerous this was. I thought the faster the better. On one day in July, I walked nearly 10 miles and ate very little. Looking back, I do not know how hunger did not overwhelm me. I do not remember feeling hunger. I was just so excited to be losing and getting back to where I wanted to be that it didn’t matter.
In retrospect, I suffered everything from headaches to heart palpitations due to the rapid loss and lack of nutrition. On June 28th, 2015, I weighed 251.6 pounds, on August 2nd, 2015, I weighed 232.6. I lost 19 pounds in a little over one month. This was nowhere close to healthy weight loss.
It’s important to note that I fell into this. I did not intend to eat so little or put myself at risk. I genuinely thought I was making good choices. All the articles I read about how being fat was dangerous and all the ideas I had suggested that I needed to get the weight off as quickly as possible.
I’ll write more about my journey next week but for now, here is a link to the National Eating Disorder Association’s helpline.