A compromise, or not really

I've been thinking a lot lately about how I'm going to continue losing weight if I can't stick with any sort of food accountability program. I need to know what's going into my mouth so I don't go overboard and undo all the work I've been putting in with exercising and all that. I've also stopped wearing my GoWear Fit that measures how many calories I burn daily. It just got annoying trying to hide it depending on the clothes I was wearing that day and dealing with the inaccuracies of putting it somewhere else that wasn't my arm (part of the reason calorie-counting was driving me mad...knowing that no matter how hard I tried, my numbers weren't exactly right).

Anywhos, I figured since neither calorie counting nor the GWF were totally accurate, I may as well stop driving myself crazy trying to be perfect and go with estimates. At this point, I have a pretty good idea of the amount of calories I would burn daily if I were to sit on the couch all day and do nothing (about 1900). And I know I can't be happy eating less than 1500-1600 calories a day currently (taking baby steps here) so any form of exercise, including biking to school, will get me at least a 500 calorie daily deficit, amounting to about 1 pound lost weekly on average. And that's how I have my goals set up right now.

And how will I know if I'm eating 1500-1600 calories a day if I'm not going to be calorie counting? Well, I don't plan on stopping that completely, but rather will lay off the details and relax a bit about putting things into SparkPeople. I generally know how much I'm eating since I eat the same things all the time, and the things I don't know I can easily look up or put into the Recipe Calculator on SparkPeople to figure out if I'm within my limits.

I really think not wearing the GWF is going to be enough to allow me to relax about knowing my exact numbers and deficits, which is a shame since I got it because I wanted to know exactly how much I'm burning daily to take out the guess factor of this weight-loss journey. I also really don't like the way it sits on my super fatty arms and sticks to my skin way too much so not having to deal with that has already made me much happier. I may rethink all that shortly, but for now that's the plan.

And in a case where I stop losing weight or am unhappy with how things are going, I plan on going back to the GWF to see if I'm estimating my burn correctly and if perhaps I'm not burning as much as I used to be burning. Same goes for calorie counting. If I do hit a plateau, I'm probably going to go back to diligently writing down everything that goes into my mouth to try to figure out why I'm stalling.

I'm hoping this plan will work. I'm not trying to lose everything super quickly, but I would like to see a steady decline.

In other news, it looks like my recent unintentional weight-loss is for real and not some kind of fluke. For the most part I've held steady since I stopped calorie counting and have somewhat gone down, which is nice to see.

Here's the most recent graph, including today's weight of 207.5, which is the lowest I've been since at least college graduation in June 2007 (not counting earlier this week, which I didn't believe so I'm discounting it). That's an almost 4 year low!

P.S. The red line is my goal of losing 1 lb. per week and the dashed black line is my real progress, which right now looks to be about 0.5 lb. per week. Not stellar, but considering I haven't been exercising much and eating a lot, it's not too bad.