hurt foot => no activity this week, but lost two pounds
I somehow hurt my heel last weekend and as a result did not do any exercise, sports, or weight lifting -- or hardly any movement! -- for seven days. (It's starting to get better now and I did upper body weights at the Y this morning.)
Referring back to my 2200 vs. 2500 calorie ponderings, in which I mentioned how at 2500 calories I wasn't getting hungry but at 2200 I was often getting hungry, I thought it was very interesting that I didn't experience much hunger this week, eating less than 2200 calories/day. Presumably the difference in hunger this week can be attributed to the fact that my body wasn't consuming as many calories as normal since I was desk/bed/sofa ridden.
And, despite the inactivity and lack of hunger, I lost two pounds this past week, and now weight 198! I'm really curious to know what I would have weighed had I had my normal active week -- too bad we can't do true split A/B tests on such things.
Anyway, I feel my hypothesis is growing stronger: active people (or at least active people like me :) have a "sweet spot" of calorie consumption at which they lose weight, have the energy they need for their activity, but don't get hungry, or at least not that hungry. Eat more than this and weight loss slows down. Eat less than this and you go around hungry and (perhaps) weight loss slows down, or at least doesn't speed up to compensate for the decrease in calories consumed, since metabolism shifts.
This sweet spot would likely shift down over time as one loses weight, since one's basal metabolism would decrease (unless one is gaining a fair amount of muscle mass by weight lifting).
For me, then, my ideal seems to be more like 2500/day than 2200/day. Since I've promised to not eat more than 2200/day until I weight 185 I'm going to stick to that, but probably I should have stayed with 2500, at least for weeks that I'm not laim.
Too bad I can't split myself into three, with one of me eating no more than 2500/day, one 2200/day, and one 1800/day. I bet adding up weight loss, energy, and lack of hunger, 2500 would win over the course of a month.
