Progress: strange, but true

My body is strange.

It's something to be put into the category of Things Mary Will Never Understand, like quantum physics or the B. triangle. Just damn weird.

A few days ago, when I was whining about my inability to lose weight, the brilliant Heather suggested Sparkpeople.com. I'd used that website last year when I was obsessively tracking my every calorie. Lately I've been concentrating on eating at least 5 servings of vegetables and avoiding Bad stuff while exercising daily. I figured I didn't need to count the actual number so long as it was all Good.

Wrong, Mary.

Tracking my actual calories turned up the fact that I was not eating enough. All those vegetables and high-fiber foods were filling, but the total added up to about 1000 calories a day. No wonder my poor body was stubbornly clinging to every pound it could; it thought I was starving it.

Anyway, this week I've adopted a strategy that seems nonsensical. Exercised less and ate more Bad food, i.e. food that was high calorie, with saturated fat. Twice this week I've actually driven to work rather than cycling in. And I've lost 4 pounds.

I'm not complaining, mind you. But it still seems strange to do bad and see good results. It's getting too awkward to try to calculate total gains/losses. (Last week I ended with a net gain of 1 pound, this week I lost 4.) Instead, I've added a weight-loss tracker to the side of the blog. Let the computer do that math-stuff for me, so I can concentrate on eating and lounging and all that kinda stuff.






Photo courtesy of Flickr