CALORIES CHALLENGE – PART 2 – MY 2 WEEKS TRANSFORMATION

By : rusalka kapradinova
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Last 2 weeks I was testing on myself sticking to the plan from the Calories Counting Part 1, which means trying to consume around 1800 calories/day. It went.. almost as planned.

My starting point:

body fat – 34.4%

muscle – 30.4%

Counting:

For monitoring my calories intake I used app MyFitnessPal. Why it’s cool?

  1. It’s good with barcodes
  2. It has nice summaries for vitamins, macros and such even in free version
  3. It also has a web version where you can get such graphs

So I started trying to stick to 1800 cal/day on 15th of May and here’s my real information:

counting_calories_with_myfitness_app

This app can show you both all calories and netto ones. If I go running, running app sends data about approximate lost calories to MyFitness app and it increases how much more I should eat to compensate exercising.

counting_carbs_with_myfitness_app
counting_fat_with_myfitness_app
counting_protein_with_myfitness_app

Difficulties:

  1. Counting calories is plain old boring. Making own food is sooo slow. I have to weight every item I put it, and i write it down on a pad and then put in all the info in the app.
  2. On the week 19-25th of May I traveled and it screwed up how much I ate and then I continued to eat less. Not on purpose. My stomach got just smaller and after that I craved less food. Since I was physically and socially tired I wanted less food and more sleep. It really lowered my intake that week to about 1400cal/day – which is my resting metabolism and sooo not enough.
  3. Eating out is madness. After eating out and it’s not some super popular place like McDonals whose food is already in database, I have to search for very similar products in database or input manually approximate weights and values.

Diet:

  1. I’m a vegetarian, so it’s kinda hard making it with protein, but I do eat fish and eggs to help with that.
  2. I eat relatively healthy – lots of veggies, but I still consume a lot of junk food. I was trying to cut on the crap food but from May 15th to May 31st I still did eat quite some chips and chocolate but still withing the calorie goal.

Result

CALORIES CHALLENGE - PART 2 - MY 2 WEEKS TRANSFORMATION_2

body fat

34.4%   →    30.2%

muscle

30.3%   →   34.3%

At first, I thought I confused the metrics, they just flipped places. I check my notes in app, notes from body check, notes in my planner… No! I was right. This is the result. I even reweighted and remeasured myself the next day because I couldn’t believe it.

Oh, and the weight?

I went from 71.9 to 71.1 kg which is basically nothing, but OK in the term of healthy weightloss of 0.5 kg/week. I’m slimmer but weight around the same for now.

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So, this have been my May challenge. I’m super happy for surviving it 😀 It wasn’t as hard as exercising challenge but very tedious never the less. It was refreshing to stick to a food goal and I will continue with it. I will continue tracking calories as agreed with dietitian from the body check to help analyse my progress in two months. I don’t have other health issues, so simply not overeating is my way to get healthier without troubles it seems, and counting calories is a huge help to understand how much I should be eating.

Do you count calories too? Or think of doing it? Share your experience in comments.