Thoughts on calories

I mentioned last week or maybe the week before that I’ve started adding more calories per day to my diet. Doing it slowly, so my body can adapt, and so it doesn’t hang on to the calories that are coming in.

Even so, I’m still losing about 2 to 2 1/2 pounds per week, which means that with the calories coming in and my current activity level the numbers still show that I require about 3000-3100 calories per day to maintain a given weight level.

Man-o-man, that’s a lot of calories. Or it seems that way, after months of about half that number…

It’s interesting to me that the numbers seem to match. It’s also interesting to me that there’s so much mysticism about food and diet, when from my experience, it’s pretty much all about the numbers. Sure, there are things you can eat that do other things for you, and maybe I’ll see that in the long run, but in the short term, if all someone cares about is losing weight, it really doesn’t matter what you eat as long as your burning more calories than you take in.

I’m not trying to belittle the process; it’s been hard, and I’ve gone over the self-imposed limit many times, but even so, I’ve had greater success longer with counting calories than I did with the Atkins diet. The Atkins diet, once you’re past the induction phase, is just a sneaky method of reducing calories, I suspect. Someday I’ll run the numbers on that to see if my hunch is correct.

In the meantime, I’m going to calculate what a 3000 calorie day would look like and post it here.