The Journey - Part IV: Eating Right

You don't get to 240 pounds by accident. I love to eat. I'm a child of the South, so I love biscuits, fried foods. I love to eat meats and cheeses.

These things are not very good for you.

So, I started to also count calories along with my exercise regiments. Someone at work recommended MyPlate as a calorie journal, and for me it worked great. You sign up for an account, enter your height and weight and how much you want to lose per week; and then you're given a daily calorie allotment. From there, you enter what you eat through the day to see if you're staying at your calorie goals.

I started at 2,500 calories per day, and now based on my current weight and weight loss goals, I'm set at 1940 calories per day. Staying in these limits takes some planning and self control. The good thing is you do get credit for calories burned during exercise.

The nice part about MyPlate is that you can search for most of the major restaurant chains and see how many calories you're consuming from their meals. Since a lot of times I end up eating out for lunch, this let me see where the calories were coming from. For instance, I love Popeye's Chicken. Every Tuesday, I would go there for Two Piece Tuesday, which was only $2.99. You get two piece of chicken, red beans and rice, and a biscuit. It is delicious. But what I learned was that red beans and rice has 320 calories - the highest calories of any part of the meal! I soon realized I could cut that in half by switching to a different side, like cajun rice.

I didn't cut out my favorite foods or restaurants (at least not right away), but using MyPlate helped me see that if I had a big lunch, then I needed to cut back at dinner. So I was able to stay under my calories, and really start to shed pounds. It gave me balance.

So that's how I got from 240 pounds to 205 pounds in less than a year. Counting the calories along with daily exercise is the secret to my weight loss. It's pretty basic stuff. But really what it took was a change in mindset. Making a decision to not just sit around and do nothing, but to take action to change my lifestyle.

Lately, lots of people at work have been commenting on how much weight I've lost. Someone looked at a picture of me from last year and told me they didn't realize how fat I was, compared to the way I look now. This really makes me feel good - but I keep in mind that I still have a long way to go. I'm at 205 now, but I'm still pinching more than an inch. I'm still overweight. And I know if I stop now, it will be real easy for me to get back up to 240 pounds - or more.

So my journey continues.