Happy Summer Solstice, everyone! It's a pretty special day here in Alaska, given how crazy our daylight situation is. It will stay bright enough outside tonight that you can read a book outside without any additional light on it. We've had rainy, overcast, cooler weather for almost the entire past month, but today is beautiful and sunny, not a cloud in the sky. This makes for a much brighter solstice, indeed!

As for my weight, I am down from the past two days to 218.8, which is still high, but oh well. I don't think I'll be able to make my mental goal of keeping my weight out of the 220's during this pregnancy, but it is still less than 9 pounds of gain, so I can't complain too much. I'm back on track with my eating today and doing very well, except for some general fatigue and not moving around much. I just haven't been feeling it, to tell the truth, and especially with my tiredness and contracting, at this point I am considering any movement a total bonus.

Melynda asked a question on a previous entry and it is a good one! For calorie counters, like me, how do we estimate our daily calorie needs? Well, basically you begin with some theoretical metabolic calculations from your age, weight, frame, and activity level. There are formulas to do this, and dozens of online calculators to help. Then, once you figure out your Basal Metabolic Rate (how much you burn just laying in bed all day) you adjust your caloric intake to have a net loss at the end of your day, which means you are burning calories and thus losing weight.

For me, I use the calculator on my iphone App called Loseit, which estimates my maintenance calories to be around 2300 a day, and thus I can cut that amount to see varying levels of weight loss. Currently I am eating at around 2000-2200 calories a day and gaining very slowly, but likely just baby weight. I should actually be losing fat. Pre-baby I could eat 1600-1800 calories a day and lose a pound or so per week.

Basically you are your own science experiment. The calculators are just a starting point, but basically you pick a calorie amount, measure and track your food calories and exercise expenditures, and see how you lose on that amount. That is where a weight log like the one I posted in the The Chart comes in handy. After a few weeks of weighing in daily it will tell you exactly how many calories you are in excess or shortage of from daily maintenance. So if you are in calorie deficit of 410 per day, you would be losing right around or slightly under a pound a week. You can then choose to raise or lower your calories depending on the results you want to see. Logging your caloric intake AND weight is really the best way to see how your body reacts to what you are eating.

My daily routine to track my weight is just to log my weight after using the bathroom in the morning, usually with no extra clothes on. I enter that into my weight log. Then throughout the day I measure my food (some things I weigh/measure strictly, like peanut butter, while other foods, like fruits and veggies, I just loosely measure) and log what I eat into my Loseit app and aim for around 2000 calories a day. Lately I have been eating over that amount if I am hungry for more, but this is more of a maintenance/intuitive eating time for me than if I was in active weightloss mode.

I hope that answers the question. You can actually modify your diet without any calculators at all, but you have to then be extra vigilant on tracking your food intake to get a precise number. Raise or lower it as needed until you see results you want, and give it a good month or two before changing to a different amount, to give your body plenty of time to react.