Diet: Phase 1

Phase 1 is complete and went extremely well. I lost 13 pounds with very little effort, no restriction of calories, and no perceivable negative side affects.

I track calories IN very accurately. Calories OUT is an approximation. I use the estimated resting calories burned for a person my height and weight with an office job, which is about 2,000 calories a day. I add any exercise I get like biking to work, lifting weights, softball, and basketball. So you can see I've been burning about 500 calories a day through exercise.

I estimate about 7 lbs of my weight loss is simply water weight (the weight dropped in the first week). But there is a discrepancy in the remaining 6 lbs. According to my calorie counting I should have lost 1.1 lbs. Where did the other 5 lbs go? Either I'm more active than I'm giving myself credit for, or the type of food I'm eating is raising my basal metabolic rate (BMR).

If you starve yourself or eat a very low calorie diet your body will naturally reduce your BMR very quickly. I don't believe my body is doing that.

I will say that tracking every calorie has made me aware of how much I ate previously. Many times in the first month I wanted to eat more but I was aware of how much I had already eaten so I decided to skip the snack I was contemplating. Also, my limited food selection prevented me from overeating. One other observation I've had is that since fats are more calorie dense than carbs or protein the volume of food I'm eating has dropped dramatically.