Eight hundred and seventy-five calories.

Per day.

This seems almost surreal, or impossible, but -- I have to learn how to eat eight hundred seventy-five more calories a day.

As a first, linear, "engineering" approximation, that is.

Bear with me.  The approximation goes like this:   One must run a calorie deficit of 3,500 calories to lose one pound of human fat, more or less.  This is a convenient number, because it is divisible by seven; it means that, in order to lose one pound per week, each day one must eat 500 fewer calories than one burns.

I have been losing one and three-quarters pounds per week.  Pretty steadily. (My expected standard deviation once I get to maintenance is approximately 1.1 pounds, according to Mark's OpenOffice spreadsheet.)

I'm almost at goal (108 pounds) and when that happens I will be trying to lose zero pounds per week.  So will be trying to run a calorie deficit of, um, zero.  Since all signs point to a current daily calorie deficit of 875 calories, the first-order approximation is to eat 875 calories more per day than I'm eating now.

Enter the two giant, dressing-soaked, Parmesan-and-crouton-laden Caesar salads.

 

Of course, I am a highly nonlinear system, and it could well be that the first-order approximation is off by a few hundred calories.  Maybe I need to add only 650 calories.  Maybe I need to add 1,000.  We will find out as I continue to graph my weight loss. 

 (You may recall that my husband is a process engineer.  He is not only making spreadsheets to figure out nerdy little things like the variance and standard deviation of my weight.  He is planning a full-fledged statistical process control scheme.  Believe me, you will hear more of this later, cross-posted to the Homemaking for Engineers category.  And if you wonder why I put up with this, you must have forgotten what I spent twelve years of my life studying.)

But the bigger question facing me now is:  OMG HOW AM I GOING TO EAT THAT MUCH FOOD?

Cathie and Amy F and CJ all guessed, one way or another, that 875 calories is the difference between what I eat now and what I ate before.  Since the slope of the weight-time graph is pretty constant, we can indeed infer that, too, as a first approximation.  I wasn't measuring before, so I can't say for sure.  

This is nearly (not quite, but nearly) two meals' worth of calories (meal size being what it is for me now).

I don't think it would be easy to do it again.  My hunger signals have adjusted.  At the end of my dinners -- just one eight-and-a-half-inch plateful -- I am stuffed.  I no longer get hungry for snacks except right before bed, and then only if I've just come back from a swim workout.  

And I'm a little bit afraid to try.  I'm afraid to stuff extra calories in.  I'm afraid to re-start the habit of snacking when I'm not hungry.  I still fight the mental urge to wander into the kitchen to pop something into my mouth when I'm bored.  I feel like I have a long way to go to cure the psychological habit of eating when I'm not hungry.  I finally understand how it can be that some women say they have trouble eating all the food they're supposed to when they're pregnant.   

I think I understand anorexia a little bit more than I did before.  It's not the fear that this one apple, this one slice of bread, will make you fat.  It's the fear that giving in to the one apple, the one slice of bread, will open the floodgates.  If I can eat one saltine cracker today when I'm not hungry, tomorrow I might allow myself two, and then before you know it it's a whole sleeve.  

Or 1.8 sleeves.

 (yes, that's how many saltines equals 875 calories)

I apologize to anyone who finds it hard to, er, feel sympathy for me being in this situation.  I am sure I would have thought so before I lost 40 pounds.  As it is, I find it more than a little surreal.  I really am not sure how I'm going to do it.

Comments

[Amber]

I know exactly what you mean - I lost a huge amount of weight after my daughter was born and I reached a point where I needed to figure out how to gain weight... but I had broken all those awful snacking & unhealthy food habits and I didn't want to go back to those bad days. It was really challenging to figure out how to make it work. I'm really not sure if I did do so, as both times I've reached this situation I ended up easing off a bit on the nursing and that closed the gap somewhat and helped me to gain/stay at a good weight. Then I got pregnant again and the whole thing started all over. *grin* I suppose someday I'll have to figure it out!

Oh, and completely unrelated, I've been meaning to thank you for an idea you put forward awhile back on serving salads. I started doing cut veggies for the kids and individual bowls for the adults and it works really well for everyone. At this point I don't think it takes longer, and I think we're all doing better in the veggie department. So, anyways, thanks for sharing that!

[Amy F]

How about purposely slowing down before reaching your goal so it's not such a shock by the time you get there? Adding a little to your plate each time you eat seems less out of whack than eating an entire extra meal. What about adding strength conditioning of some sort? Muscle weighs more than fat, so if you're gaining muscle, your weight would be higher than it otherwise would be. I might have this all twisted up, but if your calories were still low, but you were adding muscle, wouldn't your weight stay steady?

I've averaged about a pound a week drop since starting No-S a month ago. I'd like to drop another 10. I have no mental problems with adding evening ice cream back on S days, though :)

[bearing]

Amy F, isn't No S cool? In the end I decided to follow different rules, even for maintenance, but I like to think of myself as "no-s-ing in spirit."

As for gradually increasing my calories -- I'll write more about this. It is kind of my first instinct to do it that way, and I think it's sort of dietary conventional wisdom. But I'm not aware of any data that shows it's more effective at preventing weight gain than increasing all at once.

Mark had some suggestions on how to do this, coming entirely from the process engineering/SPC perspective. Adding 875 calories all at once is his idea. I'll write about that as it develops.

[Delores]

I am not sure how you adapted but I am thinking wine and cheese every night sounds pretty darn good -- fat calories, tasty, wine.