Because I've been crazy busy with the work, car shopping the kids and what not I didn't eat close enough to my goal of 1500 - 1600 calories a day. I ended up eating 800 - 900. It was good food, but after a couple of days at that level I started to feel tired. I've been able to exercise the number of min I wanted, but I had to tone the intensity down. I also felt just blah the rest of the day too. I forced myself to sit down and have a healthy dinner yesterday and I felt much better at the today. I guess in the past I would have just grabbed whatever junk was handy in situations like that. I'm glad I didn't do that, but I do still need to learn to be more precise with my meals. I'm going to add a new mini goal next week. Follow a planned menu for a week. heck given my track record I might want to start with a day.

I can see why I always read that you should never drop your calories too low. At least I'm trying to learn from my mistakes.

I'm around 295 right now. I usually eat close to 1600 a day and seem to be doing fine on that. I just let myself get scattered this week & I wasn't paying attention. When I journaled everything and saw how the calories added up it was in the evening and I didn't have much around to snack on. Plus I don't like to snack very late in the evening. I'm going to work on being much more organized this next week.

I tend to find myself coming up short quite a bit when it comes to calories so I always keep a bunch of South Beach frozen dinners around. I try to eat much better than that ordinarily, but sometimes it just doesn't work out that way and at least I can have something vaguely nutritious and calorie controlled. It keeps me from binging when all of a sudden I realize I'm starving.

This just happened to me today too. I totally fizzled out in my workout tonight, but when I looked back at yesterday's calories it was under 1500. No wonder I ran out of steam. It is so important to find the right balance - not too much to lose but also enough to feel good and healthy.

I had problems very similar to that when I first started.

Now I do what Torister does. Eat all day. I do the math on how many "mini meals" (as I call them) I'll need for work that day and pack them up. I have a bowl of cereal before I leave and two mini-dinners when I get home. It's working very nicely!

It was kind of hard at first because I was used to only eating when I was hungry, but it's getting to be a habit now and I'm never hungry!