Finally on the Right Track!

As those of you who follow my posts know, I've been struggling with a weight loss plateau for a long time now. About a week ago, I was at my doctor's for follow up to routine blood work. I asked her for advice on how to break out of this rut. She suggested that I use My Fitness Pal to count calories. Now my friend who is a fitness instructor doesn't encourage calorie counting, saying that the best thing is to listen to the promptings of your body. Because of that, I have not really spent much time on this app before now.

However, she does see the value in counting calories for a short amount of time. After having used this for about a week, I'm seeing a pattern. I seem to have a consistent issue with eating enough calories for how many I'm burning during exercise. I'm rather shocked by this, since I always thought I was eating too many calories, even after I started working out. But when I stop and think about it, it does make sense. Many experts recommend eating at least 3 meals a day, with snacks in between. I have a nasty habit of skipping lunch and I very rarely snack. Add to this, that I've been working hard to choose lower calorie options for my meals.

As I see it, my options to change this pattern are to either, work out less, or eat more. I don't see myself working out less, especially since I just joined our church's running team! More about that in a bit. So, I'm doing what I can to add more calories to my diet. One of the ways I'm doing that is by having a protein shake daily after working out.

You might be wondering, "Why is this even a problem?? Aren't we supposed to eat fewer calories than we burn?" Well, yes and no. There does need to be a deficit in our calorie intake vs. calorie burn. However, if that deficit is too high then our bodies go into starvation mode. At that point, our bodies refuse to let go of any calories and it can cause muscle to break down as well.

So, yes! I joined the running team! Today was my second 1 mile run. Now you need to understand that when I say, 1 mile run, I don't mean that I ran for that whole time. Maybe some time in the far distant future, I will be able to do that. But for now I am alternating walking with running. My goal will be to shorten the length of time I walk and increase the time I run. My first official race will be September 15. I'm sure I will be posting about it.

On the school front, we have not started up with our homeschool for the year yet. My plan is to start the week after Labor Day. The kids will have the week of Labor Day off from all school. The reason I'm doing this is because MyHero has Monday off. Many of the lesson plans in the curriculum I'm using with ManBoy are based on a 5 day school week. I don't want to break that up. So I guess those fraction lessons will have to wait. As a side note, I was excited to find out that Time4Writing has added a new high school course. This one is an essay writing course, and I have very little doubt that ManBoy will eventually be taking it.