I'm getting back on the wagon, but I'm very hungry!

[Aways2Go]

Lots of folks say lots of things about calories - eat more, eat less. Different people report success with different things. I have no doubt that consistently eating too low on the calories might slow your metabolism down. I also have no doubt that consistently eating abnormally high on the calories would also slow your weight loss down. What is too high or too low for any given person seems to be the real question.

Without counting calories specifically, I find I am normally full throughout the day eating somewhere around 1800 calories these days. I have no intention of specifically going back and eating more after that amount of calories just to increase my calorie count for the day if I don't want anything else. Now if I had only eaten say, 800 calories, that might be a different story. In that case, I might add some mayo or extra butter to some snack towards the end of the day to try to up it to 1500 or so. But if I was eating 10x my weight in calories per day, that would be 2800 calories a day for me right now. I don't want that much food, nor do I have any intention of going about TRYING to make myself eat that many calories. Just seems like bad training for the future in my opinion.

Maybe my metabolism would speed up if I ate more. Maybe it would just reinforce teaching me to eat without any regards to whether I am already full or not. Maybe it would slow my weight loss down to eat that much more. Who knows. I choose what I consider a reasonable amount of food, eat until I am satisfied, and as long as it is a reasonable amount of calories on a daily basis also, I don't concern myself with it too much. At my size, I consider anything between maybe 1500 and 2000 fairly reasonable, and it does vary from day to day somewhat within that range. If I am not much over 1000 by early evening, I do eat a little extra to try to raise it. If I go over 2000 by a little, I shrug my shoulders and say 'oh well'. Life is too short for me to wear myself out worrying about whether I ate 1425 cals or 2250 or whatever as long as I am happy with my weight loss at the current rate of about 10 pounds a month and happily going about my business without feeling stuffed or starving at any point. I am pretty happy that 1800 calories, on average, fills me up and keeps me going without my making much efforts at keeping it at that level most of the time. Simplicity is a beautiful thing.

I'm not in a race, although I would like to lose quickly as we all would. I'm mostly interested in retraining myself to eat good food in normal amounts for the rest of my life. If eating 1800 calories a day instead of 2800 (10x my current weight) is slowing that down by a few pounds a month, well that's okay by me. I'll live.