So Hungry...

For the last couple years, I've pretty much been maintaining my weight. Back in 2005, I decided to get serious about losing weight after taking one of those silly online "when will I die" surveys and having it tell me I would be dead at 56. Over the course of about 2 years, I went from 250 pounds to around 160. Since then, my weight has fluctuated, going up to 165 at times and down to 150 at others. My eating habits have been much better than they were 5 years ago, but there is still quite a bit of room for improvement.

So I've decided to improve them. I'm going back to counting calories like Scrooge McDuck counting money. I'm going to exercise more. My goal is to drop 20 pounds. Why 20? I don't know. It seems like a nice number.

This is going to be tough - I've cut out the easy stuff, so the stuff that's left is the stuff I really like, and that makes it harder to cut. But there is still plenty of it - I tend to eat fairly large dinners, which are often heavy on carb-heavy side dishes. I usually have a big bowl of light ice cream every night. If I go out to eat, I usually order whatever I want. If someone at work brings in donuts, I usually eat them. I often splurge on breakfast on weekends and get some sort of sugary pastry. I tend to have a mid-afternoon snack. All of those things need to go.

I also need to exercise more. I typically do 90 minutes of cardio most days. I'm going to try to build that up to two hours, and change the "most days" to "every day". I want to try to start going to the gym twice a day on weekends, and if I can get myself out of bed early enough during the week, twice a day during the week too.

The funny thing is I didn't realize how fat I was until I started writing this post - I went to the Government's BMI calculator and found out that being 5'5" and 150 pounds actually makes me overweight, with a BMI of exactly 25. In order to be considered underweight, I would actually need to lose 40 pounds, which would give me a BMI of 18.3. I thought 20 pounds might be pushing it, since I didn't think I had a huge amount of visible fat - I've got a little bit of a gut, but didn't think a 34" waist was that bad. Evidently it is.

I'm trying to make a bunch of small changes to my diet - a lowfat yogurt instead of that bowl of ice cream, less carbs, sugars, and fat, more whole grains, more water, more vegetables. The funny thing is I already feel like I'm hungry all the time, even though I haven't cut out that much yet. I guess it's probably psychological - I keep thinking about dieting, so I keep thinking about being hungry, even though I'm really not.

I don't know how successful I'll be at this, but I'd hate to fail at it, like I seem to fail at almost everything else. Part of the reason I think this is a good idea is because I've been striking out at dating - I don't know if this is because of my weight, and I know it can't be all my weight, since I hadn't even met the last woman who told me she "didn't see this going anywhere" in person. But I'm not really sure how to change my personality, or my appearance beyond my weight. I do know how to lose weight - eat less, exercise more. I figure obsessing about my weight will give me something to think about besides the twin wrecks that are my career and my social life.