It's working!

Changing my calorie burning goals was a GREAT idea. For example, today I ran 1.5 miles, sprinted up a hill (the hill) 6 times, and walked home 1.5 miles. I'm on track to burn 2160 calories for the day.

Normally, this would upset me because with that exercise I still won't reach my goal of 2,300 calories burned. But now that I've changed my goal to 2,000 calories, I'm absolutely ecstatic. With this progress, I'm guaranteed to lose at least a pound a week if I keep my food intake under control. It's great to know that I'm actually losing weight with all the effort I'm putting in lately.

The same feeling of "Awesome! I've burned a ton of calories." came yesterday after a morning of snowboarding. In the 1.5 hours I actually spent on the mountain doing things, I burned about 600 calories more than I would've had I been sitting on the couch. For that much exercise, 600 calories isn't much. But considering I only need to burn 2,000 burned daily, it totally busted that goal and I was incredibly happy with myself.

Moral of the story (and my motto in life): Lower your expectations and you'll never be disappointed.

Just kidding. The better moral is to have realistic expectations so that the motivation to achieve them is not lacking.