I don’t like to talk about it too much, but I do slightly obsess about my body and my weight loss. Ok slightly is an understatement. And I try to be positive but there are days and moments that I get down. I feel with all the hard work I have been doing, that I should be seeing greater weight loss. And then I need to almost mentally slap myself because losing 7 pounds in 2 months isn’t a terrible thing especially when considering how many inches have been coming off–almost 20! The good thing about my obsession is that on various websites I look for people like me who are on a similar journey to see what they are going through, why they are successful and reaching out to them. Today I stumbled upon this girls Tumblr weight loss journal and her struggles and triumphs. She had this link, where she explained how she was successful in losing weight and I found it to be the best, most informative page I have read since I began trolling people’s pages. Here are the things I took away that I haven’t been using, but I plan on, going forward:

1. How to Calculate Daily Calorie Intake—this site has you put in your weight, gender, age, and activity level. If you put in sedentary, that will be the minimum amount of calories you should intake with doing nothing during a day to stay at the weight you are now. To lose a pound a week, you should be eating 500 calories under that number. But the key here is that you never and I mean never eat under 1,200 calories a day. That is unhealthy and your body will think you are starving it and it will hold onto your weight for as long as it can. Based off this tool, if I were sedentary, I would need to eat 2,190 calories to stay at the weight I am right now. To lose a pound a week, I would need to eat 1,690 calories, which I usually come in around.

2. Calories Burned Calculator—this site gives you the ability to calculate accurately how many calories you are burning by the different activities you do, which include fun things like cooking, painting, bowling and even sex!! LoL It told me that my boot camp sessions are not burning as many calories as I thought they were (but not by much) and I am excited to put these new numbers in to be even more accurate in my daily tracking on My Fitness Pal.

It is a lot of help to find these people around me to help me be inspired and to give tips like this. I hope that others find this helpful too and will be successful because of it.