elmfraser's Journal

OK, so for this week I am not counting calories at all, to see what happens. I was obsessing way too much and, given that I'm at maintenance now, I'm trying to just chill out about it. I eat when I'm hungry, I stop when I'm not, I try to make healthy choices and I allow myself one treat every day or two.

Of course, I'm worried that it's all going to backfire on me and I'll blow up like a balloon, but if it does, I'll take it off again, and that will be that. I'm finding myself much more relaxed since I stopped worrying so much about it, though. I do still kind of count in my head (force of habit!) but I'm starting to think more in terms of "reasonable serving sizes" and less in terms of calories per se.

I also wonder if maybe I have a high metabolism, so it might be that my maintenance cals are a little higher than 1700. I have always been slight, and living in residence I ate the world's WORST diet and gained seven pounds over the course of eight months. I basically ate eggs and cereal for breakfast, sometimes tater tots too, salad for lunch when I was feeling virtuous and caferteria food, which is 50% fat and 50% sugar the rest of the time, usually fries with either, and then cafeteria food for dinner and one or two cafeteria-sized desserts, sometimes one with lunch as well. Plus I snacked late at night on really unhealthy stuff like chips and on high-calorie stuff like peanut butter because caf food doesn't keep you full for long. Every day. I must have been eating over 2000 calories per day, and I definitely fell short of the Freshman 15. I didn't exercise at all, either. So I'm hoping that I may just have a high calorie requirement, which would explain why I'm still pretty hungry a lot of the time, even though I'm eating at maintenance, and also why I've eaten like crazy my entire life and stayed relatively slender for most of it. So I'm trying this experiment and if I start to gain, I'll start to count again but neurotic as I am, I shouldn't be doing it if I don't have to.

This is me relaxing. I am relaxed. If I keep saying that, it will happen soon, right?