The past couple of weeks I haven’t been thinking like a fit person.  I had met a goal I had been training for since January of running another 5k, I’d trained three-four times a week, and greatly improved my endurance and speed drastically.  I beat my previous 5k time by four minutes.  I should have been very happy.

Truth is, it was in the middle of a stressful time at work, more stresses from home.  During the last few weeks, I didn’t find a good outlet for letting out my frustrations.  I grew increasingly isolated and withdrew into myself. I made some really bad decisions with my time, which only increased the stress I felt, along with guilt and shame.  I should have recognized the signs,  found one of my support friends and worked things out.  Instead I let pride get the better of me (again) and the end result was I regressed.  All of that has nothing to do with dieting, but part of the reason I’m on this journey is to be more fit, and fit isn’t just a physical property, but also a emotional and spiritual component as well.  So this post is the beginning (again) of me trying to think like a fit person, and recommitting myself to the practices I’ve fostered the past couple of years to become the person I want to be.

So… with that as prelude, I’m going to go back to some number crunching. 

The last two weeks hasn’t been great on the scale.  A two week plateau isn’t something I want to continue, though I do understand that plateaus happen, and two weeks really is fairly small in the scheme of a two year plan.  From the forums at LoseIt! I’ve read many posts that list the Fat 2 Fit Radio podcast.  So yesterday I finally took sometime to download a couple of shows and listen to them as I made dinner and agreed with their philosophy.  The main thesis of their show isn’t dieting tips, but changing the way you think, instead of thinking diet, think like a fit person.  (This also brought me back to my mid-twenties reading Covert Bailey’s Fit or Fat… wish I could re-read that book…)

A lot of their advice is based on calculating your Basal Metabolic Rate, and finding a calorie level that supports your lifestyle. So I plugged in my numbers, and find their numbers to be slightly higher than the calculations used on LoseIt! but not too far off.  They also have a range of Body Fat Percentage calculators.  Body Fat percentage is a good tool to help determine a goal weight, more than scale weight.  I don’t want to lose a lot of muscle while I lose body fat, so I used my latest measurements to find estimates of my BF%, to help me better understand where my goal weight should be. 

The calculators have given me a range of body fat from ~25% (Covert Bailey’s formula) to ~30% (DoD calculator).  That means my Lean Body Mass (the parts of me that aren’t fat) is anywhere from ~194 – 219 pounds.  This really highlights my current long term goal weight of 192 pounds as unattainable without causing some serious damage to my metabolism.  So I need to reassess my goals. The healthy range of body fat for a man my age is between 11%-22%, so hitting the midrange of 17% using my current (USN) BF% puts the number at around 230* pounds, which would also maintain my lean body mass. 

So taking that new goal weight and feeding it back into the Fat 2 Fit BMR calculator, I get a range of BMR from 2265 (Katch-McArdle) to 2451 (Harris Benedict) calories per day.  Now, according to Fit to Fat’s calculation, that equates to ~2568 calories for a sedentary lifestyle, or ~2942 calories for a Lightly Active (exercise 1-3 per week).  My current LoseIt calorie goal is under 2500 calories, and I usually try to give me a bit of a buffer and eat a bit less than that, so I may be under-eating (again). 

My plan then, is to adjust my LoseIt! goals to 1 pound/week, and re-start my running training.  I need to find another race to enter to have that goal to strive for, and this time probably make it a 10K race in a couple of months.  Those goals should help me with my physical ‘fit’ person mentality.  I’ll still need to work on the emotional and spiritual parts of thinking like a Fit Person, and those I’ll work on, one day at a time.

* That’s also the end of my 23 pound mini-goal (my LOST It! plan is to hit mini-goals of all the LOST numbers, I’ve achieved 42, 4, 8, mini-goals, and currently working on the 15 pound goal, so when I achieve this goal, I’ll only have 16 and 23 left to be at goal weight. WOOT!)