My Exercise and Diet Plan

I have a little under 28 days until my birthday party at RenFest.  When I bought my corset, I was 175 and asked them to fit it extremely tightly.  I want to have to relace that thing this year.  That means, I have to get as small as possible by that day.  With some work, I created a healthy, happy 10 pounds in 28 days plan!

Using the Harris Benedict Equation, I have a daily caloric need of 1853.  My BMR is 1544, so I don't want to drop below that.  That gives me a daily deficit naturally of 309 calories.

As far as eating goes, I'm going to stick it hard to my thyroid diet prescribed to me by my doctors.  Over the years I've been hypothyroid, I do eat mostly to the diet but I cheat every now and then.  Sometimes I just want a glass of milk or a nice bowl of watermelon, dang it!  If I were on maintain, those cheats would be just part of me maintaining my lifestyle and still enjoying my food.  However, I'm not there yet.  That means those little cheats are a big no-no.  I need to cleanse my body of all the foods it can't handle.

On top of that, I used a little calculation to determine the amount of water I need to drink every day.  You take your weight, divide it by 2.2 and then divide that by 8.  I came up with a number just over 9, but I rounded up anyway and ended up with a whopping 10 glasses of water every day.

Unfortunately, that's not enough to lose the weight I need to lose.  I also know from experience that diet alone doesn't work for those of us with hypothyroidism.  Even if the calories are right, your metabolism simply adjusts.  So I've got to add in quite a bit of exercise to the equation.

But how much?  If a pound of fat takes 3500 calories to remove and I have ten of them, I'm looking at burning 35000 calories in the next for weeks.  Yeouch!  Breaking that down, that's 1250 calories a day and I only get 309 from food. That leaves a whopping 941 calories in exercise.

Exercise is a tricky thing.  I don't want to hurt myself or stress myself out about it, so the best bet is to break it into easy, doable segments.

Here's the breakdown:

Activity	Calorie Deficit
Diet	309
Morning Daily Exercises	150
Afternoon Exercise	320
Evening Exercise	320
Night Daily Exercises	150

That creates a grand total of 1250 calories a day.  Well, technically, it's 1249 but I assume at one point I'll go at least a calorie over.

For the Morning and Night Daily Exercises, this is my planned routine:

Activity	Number of Reps
Push-ups	10
Jumping Jacks	50
Sit-ups	20
Plank	45 Seconds
Cannons	10
Mountain Climbers	10
Bicycles	20

Of course, the more I do it, the less calories this will burn.  Every Sunday, I will be doing as many as I can and readjusting the numbers from there.

Now, what about the Afternoon and Evening Exercise sets?

For the afternoon, I've broken it down to four cardio and three muscle building exercise videos a week.  A huge thank you to Fitness Blender, and of course, Les Mills Combat and Chalene Johnson's TurboFire.

For the evening, I'll be beginning my 5k training.  I'll be jogging and walking until my heart rate monitor turns the 320 mark.  Maybe even longer!

Speaking of which, my heart rate monitor is going to play a huge part in this.  How do you know how many calories your burning in an exercise?  A nice wireless heart rate monitor with a chest strap makes everything so much easier!

And finally, on top of all of this, getting back on my levothyroxine will certainly help.  I can't even believe that I fell off of it!  My big goal for the first week of October will be seeing an endocrinologist to help me with my final big 10-13 pounds.

For all of the work this seems, it's actually not too much.    I'm assuming my Daily Exercises will take around 20 minutes per session.  The major exercise sessions in the afternoon and evening should be around 45 minutes each.  Between the two, I'm looking at a little over two hours a day.  The Daily Exercises will be done right when I wake up and right before I go to bed - a time where I'd be spending my 20 minutes doing nothing.  So I'm not losing any time there.  The afternoon slot can be done on my lunch break and my evening slot can be completed with Aaron when he gets home from work and the sun has set a bit.

All in all, I readily expect to lose the weight I want to lose with this and correcting the mistakes I made over the past few months.  Even if I miss out on a few exercise days, I should get extremely close to my goal.

With that being said, I need to hop in to my afternoon exercise!