New direction

I had hit another dreaded plateau for a few weeks, bobbling up and down about 1.5 pounds.  Though I know I'm still losing inches, I hate scale plateaus and decided to research to see if maybe there is another reason for it.

What I came up with was this:  I needed to either eat more or exercise less, or some combination of both.  My kettlebell training, which is every other day, expends about 850 calories for 50 minutes.  Though that's great, the fact is that if I don't eat back any of those calories, it would leave me with a net calorie intake of less than 400 calories.

Though one would think that anything worked off that goes beyond what we eat would automatically result in pounds lost, the fact is that our bodies only look at the net calories, apparently.  So, day after day, my body thinks I'm starving because IT only sees those 400 calories.

Okay, so I decided to go against what we THINK we should do and scale back my exercise somewhat and intensify parts of it.  Because of my band, it's nearly impossible (and rather dumb) to eat back my exercise calories.  As it was, I was somewhat supplementing with candy.  Which, I know, is rather dumb.  So starting Sunday I decided to reduce my kettlebell training to about 20 to 25 minutes on my weight days, and to do about 30 minutes or so of cardio on my alternate days.

I also remember that our bodies tend to get used to the exercises we do if we keep doing the same thing for weeks on end -- which I've been guilty of.  So on my cardio days, I have begun to do shorter bursts with higher intensity -- and to shake up what I'm doing (previously, my cardio was 50 minutes on the elliptical only).  For the next couple weeks, I will be doing a combination of my walk-run, where I walk for two minutes and run for two minutes, and do this back and forth for 30 minutes.  It is actually one of the suggestions for HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) that is becoming popular these days.

Just since making these two changes this week, I've lost 1.4 pounds since Saturday!  It's great that I may actually get more for less when it comes to my workouts.  I mean, who WOULDN'T be all for realizing weight loss for half the exercise?  :)