My diet

Now that the first post is out of the way, I can get down to work.  Generally, I struggle with food.  I love fried foods, I love carbs and I like to eat a lot (I am, at my core, a comfort eater, although this is coming under control now).  Thankfully, I am not too keen on sweets and I am allergic to chocolate - so maybe it's not all bad!

I have read that the safest (and surest) way to lose weight is to lose about 1 or 2 pounds a week.  The aim is to lose fat (not just kilos, because you could do that just by losing water or, worse, muscle).  A pound of fat is equivalent to 3500 calories, so you would need to have a calorie deficit of 500 per day to lose a pound a week (i.e., burn 500 calories more per day than you take in).  So that's the theory, and I'm all on top of that, but the practice is where I am having trouble.  

There are two problems.  One is that I love all that unhealthy stuff I talked about above.  Two is that it is really hard to know where to pitch your eating, as it were.  If I need to have a 500-calorie deficit each day, what do I need to do to achieve that?  How many calories am I actually burning per day on the days that I exercise?  And without exercise?  And how much and what should I eat to achieve that deficit?  From experience, I can say that it's no good eating too little - when I went too far in the other direction, I felt sapped of energy.  Plus, I have read that your body goes into starvation mode - it makes you feel more hungry and it burns muscle instead of fat in your body(!).

To help me with the second problem, I have asked my doctor to refer me to a dietician.  Hopefully she should have some numbers I can work with.  The first problem is more complicated.  But there is progress.  Today, I met a friend for an unplanned lunch.  The menu had a lot of tasty sounding fried things on it, and I really wanted the deep-fried wholetail scampi and chips.  A voice inside me said: "have the salad".  But I didn't want to eat something cold and dull.  So I had a pasta with lots of asparagus and broccoli (and I asked for the pesto on the side).  White pasta, so not ideal, but hey at least I didn't have the scampi!