Now I know, it may be one of the oldest resolutions out there (and the easiest one to fail on), but that’s what I made this year. Mostly because I’ve already been at it for over two months now with huge success. My goal? Another 15 pounds, making me less than I have been in nearly ten years.

It started somewhere in October. I weight a whopping 170 pounds, and I just felt fat. Who’s really comfortable being overweight? Not me, that’s for sure. Especially when my own mother is a good 50 pounds under me. Yes, she’s a toothpick, and I remind her of it daily. I no longer go clothes shopping with her, and if she tries, I tell her perhaps my kids have clothes she can wear.

Back to my own weight issues…….

Being a tad on the short side, I really should be around 130 lbs or less. That was my BC weight (you know, “Before Children”). Those days have come and gone though, so I’ve given away my boxed up size 6 jeans who’s only purpose now is to mock me.

So my first goal, set around Halloween, was to drop 15 pounds by New Years. That would put me at 155, which I haven’t seen since before I was pregnant with my second kid. And guess what? I hit it, dead on, with a brand new habit of eating less.

It was simple really. All I did was keep track of how much I ate and how many calories I burned. More burned than intake. Easy. I ate a minimum of 1200 calories a day, but some days I was hungry. Especially at the beginning, but my desire to lose weight squashed the craving and eventually I wasn’t even able to eat that much.

My eating habits didn’t really change, but rather were rearranged. I still ate my ‘mountain pizza’ at 500 calories per slice (yeah that was a shocker), but only ate 2 slices instead of 4 and didn’t eat any more meals on those days. I cut down on my morning cappuccino from 6 heaping tablespoons to 3 normal sized teaspoons, and from 2 glasses down to 1. I also cut down on the pop, and somehow ended up cutting it out of my diet all together with (wasn’t intended, but I ended up replacing it with one vitamin water a day instead of 2 or 3 bottles of pop). There also wasn’t junk food in the house, even though there never was before, but rather those 100 calories packs of various foods (Oreo crisps included!). That way I still got “snacks”, but didn’t go overboard or over eat.

Now as for exercise, I still couldn’t seem to pry my lazy rear out of the chair. Much to my surprise though, it didn’t matter. At my current weight, I manage to burn an average of 2300 calories a day doing my normal daily activities. So all I did was make sure I didn’t eat over 1300 calories a day, and I managed to burn 1,000 every single day. That’s 2 pounds a week, the max of what you can be burning unless otherwise directed. So 8 weeks later burning 2 pounds a week (taking breaks for Thanksgiving and Christmas overeating, which I really just broke even on those days), I dropped 15 pounds. TA DA!

I’ve been coasting for the past week to see how I do with my new smaller appetite, and so far I’ve dropped another pound. Next week I’ll jump back in and just do some calorie counting to see where I’m at, then get fully back into this. I have another 15 pounds to go, so by the time my class reunion rolls around I’ll be dang near at where I was in high school. Fantastic, right?

So to recap, my “method” is nothing more than burning more calories than I take in, and keeping good record of it all. I write down EVERYTHING from the 130 vitamin water to the 200 calorie fun size candy bar (and yes, those are a rare treat when I can spare the calories for the day). If it doesn’t have a label, you can look up just about any food online (like eggs, fast food meals, and veggies).

To keep track of what you burn, I highly suggest this website:
http://www.caloriesperhour.com/

Good luck!