Here’s My Plan

Last weekend I talked about my desire to lose the last fifteen pounds and get down to 200lbs. Assuming I can do this without losing muscle mass, I should be at just the right amount of body fat for a 34 year old man who’s athletic and works out a lot. Now I’m a big believer in planning and I urge anyone who’s planning to improve their health to sit down and plan for a bit before jumping right in. So I followed my own advice and came up with a plan.

Eating Plan

I looked at a variety of calculators out there, and it seems like I need to eat about 3000 calories a day to maintain a goal weight of 200lbs. That number is for a 34 year old man with a moderate physical activity level. The numbers I saw actually varied from 2900 all the way up to 3100 depending on the calculator I used, so I took an average of 3000. I plan on splitting this number up into four meals. For breakfast I will try to eat about 500 calories, for lunch about 1000, another 500 for an afternoon snack and finish off the day with 1000 for dinner.

Now obviously these numbers are just guidelines. I’m not going to sit there at every meal counting every last calorie and making sure I don’t go over or under my number. However, I will keep track of this on a daily basis and see how well I’m doing. More on the tracking bit later on in this post.

This represents a slight change over my current eating plan of about 200 calories per day. This is where I’m hoping the weight loss comes from since my physical activity is going to remain roughly the same.

Physical Activity Plan

I’m already very active, so I don’t think I’ll be changing this too much. My current activity plan goals are:

• Weight training 3 to 4 times a week
• 1 30 minute walk every day
• Cardio training 3 times a week
• Biking to work three times a week
• One physical activity every weekend such as hiking

Control

One of the most important part of any plan is a control. How are you going to measure your progress? How are you going to verify that you’re sticking to the plan? Normally I would do this by keeping a food journal on my PC for a month when the plan first kicked in and keeping track of my workout in Excel. However, for the purposes of this change, I’m going to use a site called FitDay. This will allow me to share the progress of the plan with everyone reading 60 in 3.

I will also be doing weekly weigh ins. I would normally do monthly ones since I don’t really expect to lose a considerable amount of weight every week, but I thought it might be interesting to see changes on a weekly basis.

Time Line

Another important part of any plan is a time line. When are you putting the plan into effect? When does each part of the plan go live? When do you expect to see results? When do you review the plan to see if you need to make changes?

• Eating Plan - In effect as of today
• Activity Plan - Mostly in effect. My injured toe means I may not be doing my walks every day but otherwise the plan is in effect.
• Control - Fitday account has been created and I will play around with the site this weekend and start using it next Monday.
• Results - I expect to lose about .5lbs every week. This means I want to be at my goal weight of 200lbs in 30 weeks. That’s Mid 2008. Yep, that’s right, 15lbs in 7 months. Sounds slow to you? Well, if you’re used to reading ads about losing 30lbs in three days I suppose it might. Then again, how often have you seen these diets work in the long term? Where as my plan is sustainable, practical and healthy.
• Retune - I expect to review my results at the beginning of every month to see how I’m doing. That’s when I’ll make adjustments if necessary.

EDIT - here are the sites I used:

Calorie calculator - Click on the “calorie’s burned calculator” tab and then select the BMR calculator

FitDay - You might need to create an account to use all their features. However, once you do that and enter in some personal information, FitDay will also calculate your daily calories for you and display then in the activities section.

I also did some work on a few other sites that I found with a simple Google search for “BMR calculators”.  Just note that most of the other sites do not consider physical activity into their calculations so you’ll have to add that separately.

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