Health is Wealth

In the past I've used weight watchers as my go-to choice for counting calories/points fungus (or funds before my fingers mistyped..ha!) are tight right now so I'm using my fitness pal. The only problem with MFP is that they give you weird amounts of calories. When I signed up I got 1700 calories to eat in a day. I know that something is wonky with that because I've been this weight on WW and gotten a lot of points, more than I thought I could eat in a day. Also, when I used the arm band thing to count calories it was telling me waaaay more than 1700. 

But I thought its MFP they can't be that off, and so I ate 1700 calories for a week. I'm not saying that I was starving but I was tired (more than usual) irritable and actually gained weight that week! So by the end of the week I knew something was horribly wrong and it wasn't me, I was eating 3 healthy meals a day along with snacks and tons of water plus running almost every day because I was getting ready for that race. 

Well I said something to my mom about this and she thought that 1700 seemed weird so last weekend I looked up every calorie calculator that I could find on the internet and they were all pretty much in the same ball park 2130 to 2200 calories so I picked 2150 because it was somewhere between the two that I was getting. The first couple of days it was hard to make myself eat that much more food, fitting in 400 more calories sounds like it would be easy but most of my meals I had made with the 1700 in mind and I felt like I was eating a TON more food. But lo and behold about Wednesday I started to see the weight just fall off. I don't know what it was, maybe just water weight but I've lost 4 pounds (probably water weight my body didn't want to get rid of because I was starving it) in the past week. 

I don't feel as tired (any more than normal) I'm actually getting better sleep now, I'm not as grouchy and my tummy feels full at meals, which is nice. A lot of the calories I added in were half a serving more of the soup I made or eating more veggies with dinner and lunch or being able to fit in a snack in the afternoon (usually air popped pop corn) or a cup of coffee with creamer (yum!) in the morning or a beer or some chocolate as a treat at the end of the day! Its nice to be able to fit that into my food. And I know from WW that if I go over, it won't be the end of the day, yesterday I went over my calories and I still lost weight. WW gives you 7+ points a day or 47 to spend however you want plus any activity you earn, so I know that I'm going to be just fine if I do go over or there is something that I REALLY want to eat when I go out with my husband.

I'm also reminded that I have to eat to lose weight! You can't starve yourself! And also that the most important thing for me isn't the scale, its being healthy and I think thats something that all people who are losing weight struggle with, yes we want to be skinny and thin but ultimately I want to be as healthy as possible.

The other night I was talking to Corey and he said the sweetest thing that in all these years of trying to lose weight he never said, he told me that he didn't care if I was thin or not, just that I was healthy. He said that he loved me no matter what my size was, if I was a bigger person who was healthy and worked out and ate right then he would be just as happy as if I was a thin person and did the same thing. Talk about cool!