donny kemick

I’ve been at it for 2 weeks now and I have to say, it’s easily the hardest workout I’ve ever done.  It’s even harder than conditioning for high school basketball.  You know it’s tough when it’s hard to get through the pre-stretch warm-up.  That being said, my cardio is already improving.

Ultimately, I’m trying to lose weight so why don’t we start there?  In 2 weeks, I have lost 10 pounds!  I can feel the weight dripping off of me with every workout.

With these results and the fact that Insanity continues to get harder as the program goes on, I think I’ll be able to hit my goal weight by the time I reach the end of the 60 days.

Basketball

I should disclose that I also play basketball 3 days a week for an hour in the morning.  I still do my Insanity workout on those days too. 

Diet

Since starting Insanity I have also cut my calories.  I found the way to calculate your caloric needs to maintain your current weight:

Start with your basal metabolic rate (BMR – amount of energy your body needs to function):

Adult Women:
655 + (4.3 x weight in pounds) + (4.7 x height in inches) – (4.7 x age in years)

Adult Men:
66 + (6.3 x weight in pounds) + (12.9 x height in inches) – (6.8 x age in years)

Add Activity to your BMR Value:

• If you are sedentary : BMR x 20 percent
• If you are lightly active: BMR x 30 percent
• If you are moderately active (You exercise most days a week.): BMR x 40 percent
• If you are very active (You exercise intensely on a daily basis or for prolonged periods.): BMR x 50 percent
• If you are extra active (You do hard labor or are in athletic training.): BMR x 60 percent

Your result is the number of calories per day you can consume to MAINTAIN your current weight.

How to Cut Weight

Take your calculated maintenance calories and subtract 500.  You can subtract more but make sure you stay above 1000 calories if you are female and 1200-1300 if you are a male. 

Why you ask?  I recently learned about our body’s starvation mode.  Apparently it’s roots go way back to when we were hunters and gatherers and had stretches of time when we didn’t have food. 

Essentially, when your body is deprived of a certain level of calories for a period of time, it starts to reserve the calories we eat as fat and eats away at muscle tissue instead.  It’s like a survival mode for our bodies.  Your metabolism drops in this mode making it harder to burn calories as well.

The exact caloric input that is required to avoid this mode is not known and varies for everyone.  Some signs that you are in it include:

• Weight Loss stalls
• Lack of hunger at meal time even though they’ve had hardly any calories
• Consistently tired even with acceptable levels of sleep

I actually tried going on about 1100 calories a day for about 4 days and it wasn’t too bad.  I did however notice that the weight wasn’t coming off as fast as it should.  Make sure you eat enough!

How Many Calories to Burn to Lose Weight

The principle is pretty strait forward.  To lose weight, you need to burn more calories than you consume.  But just how many calories should be burned?  To lose 1 pound, you need to burn about 3500 calories.  So, if you burn about 1800 calories more than you consume in a day, you should lose about a half a pound. 

So far in my dieting, I have found that to be very accurate. 

Counting Calories Sounds Like It Sucks!

In order to find out if you’re burning enough calories in a day and staying in your caloric range, you obviously have to know how many calories you’re consuming and burning.  Doing this manually is an option, but not one I would recommend.  There are many sites online that will allow you to track your calories and exercise.  The problem is, you don’t always have your computer with you…

For me, that meant that I needed an option that I could access on my smartphone.  The site and FREE service that I decided to go with is FatSecret.com.

I liked this service because they have an Android app, iPad app, and a web version.  The service let’s me track every meal and drink I consume, as well as every exercise I do.  It even tracks things like desk work.

I am very committed to entering everything into this app.  It also allows you to record your weight progress.

 

I will continue to write updates as I can!