idle musings

I’m busy reading the archives of Shapely Prose because 1. I love the way Kate writes and 2. I love what she has to say. In her Numbers post she talks about putting her stats into a daily needs calculator. She was astonished that the calculator told her that her body needs 2500 calories a day. Because, as anyone knows who has dieted at all, anything over 2000 is just insane. Jenny Craig starts you at 1700 calories, which is more generous than Weight Watchers was to me – they started me at 22 points a day (1 pt = 50 calories roughly so that meant 1100 calories per day, plus activity points).

So out of curiosity, I decided to plug my own stats into the calculator. I’m 5’5″, 28 years old, female, and I guessed my current weight to be 170. I added one hour of ju jitsu/kickboxing as activity every day. And my results – 3550 calories per day. Did you catch that? Let me type it again in bold just to make sure: 3550 calories per day.

(To be clear, I’m not saying that this website is the be all end all. It’s just interesting to see a calculation that says that if I want to maintain at my current weight, given my activity level, I should be eating that many calories when it is drummed into our heads over and over again that anything over 2000 is too much.)

Is it any wonder that I was hungry all the fucking time when I was doing Weight Watchers? I would feel guilty about having a little extra pasta after a strenuous kickboxing class because that would put me over 1800 calories for the day that Sparkpeople said was my upper limit. 1800 calories which isn’t even half the amount of calories that apparently I need to simply be me (2635 calories/day) and do my exercise (914 calories/day). Even on days when I don’t go to the dojo, I should be eating more than 1800 calories.

And yet I was made to feel like the failure at these programs. Clearly if I just ate a little less or exercised a little more I could lose the weight. Was I drinking all my water? Eating enough fruit and veggies? Yes? Well then just eat a little less, dear, and you’ll see the weight drop right off. Oh – you are eating right in your range? Well then just exercise a little harder because you are obviously doing something wrong.

Right. The thing that I was doing wrong was 1. believing that I was fat in the first place and 2. starving myself for a “lifestyle change” that turns out to be a diet after all. Props to Weight Watchers for duping me – I do tend to think of myself as a fairly smart person but I totally did not see this one coming.

End result – I’m probably not eating close to 3550 calories every day. Sure I have days where I pig out on the bad stuff, or don’t have any food in the house so I run to McDonalds. But since I like veggies (and eat them as much as my IBS will allow) and I like to cook my own food (thereby decreasing the amount of processed food that I eat), I’m probably comfortably around 2500-2800 calories a day. I don’t know. I don’t really care to know. What I do know, however, is that I am determined to be a healthy person, and for me, health does not include obsessing over every bite of food I eat. Healthy is not thinking about food all the fucking time which I did while trying to follow those diets. Because, of course, I was actually starving myself, rather than dieting. No wonder my brain could think of nothing else – I was hungry! The only time I didn’t notice this was when I was in Europe and that was because I put the whole thing on hold and ate sensibly, the majority of the time.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, other than to vent some of my rage at myself for buying into the commercialized concept of beauty, and our culture for indoctrinating us at such a young age that if we just could follow the rules, we too could achieve the (impossible) ideal.