holiday bump up

Considering what I ate on the holiday and the surrounding days, I'm rather surprised that when I weighed myself on Sunday I'd only put on 1 pound.

Well, actually, that's going by my rounding up way of doing things. I think it was probably more like 2 pounds if you take the decimal points way of doing it. But still, 2 pounds isn't a huge amount.

Or rather, 2 pounds isn't as much as I was expecting. It's a lot of weight, representing around 7,000 additional calories consumed, over and above what I needed for my base metabolism and the exercise I did. And I did a lot of exercise - the GP weekend involved walking some 15 miles, I reckon, and that's just the walking. There was all the lugging of stuff around and the calories I would have needed to keep me going without enough sleep and all that.

But the point is I'm not even going to pretend I ate anything like sensibly, but I still only put on a couple of pounds, which probably suggests I did do a hell of a lot to burn those calories off. If I had dieted or even been moderately sensible I bet I'd have lost half a stone.

You also always have to bear in mind that, when you're big, your metabolism is higher because you're burning extra calories just to kept yourself warm and when you're moving to shunt all the extra weight around. So, in other words, sensible (i.e. balancing my metabolism) is somewhere in the region of 3,250 calories, even now.

I think I've managed to confuse myself, as I'm now not sure if I'm arguing my two pound gain was good, bad or better or worse than expected. In many ways I'm actually just trying to fill a blog post where I would normally have an entry about my diet and exercise, only I've been off the diet and the exercise wasn't properly monitored.

What it all does mean is I won't be making my original target, set back when I started this stretch of the diet. Indeed, overall, I'm unlikely to have lost very much weight at all across this period. That's not great, obviously, but at least I've not had a net gain - it will definitely be a few pounds lower than at the start, it's just not going to be as much as I'd hoped/planned.