Jan 21 – I woke up early this morning after only six and a half hours of sleep. I need eight. I don’t know how much longer I can survive on getting only four to seven hours of sleep per night. I find it stressful knowing that I haven’t been getting enough sleep. I now have about five days of banked calories. I still haven’t gone over my daily allotment on any single day, though I’ve come close a number of times. I weighed myself this morning and weighed about two pounds heavier than three days ago. As much as this whole thing is not about weight loss, I would like to see myself lose some weight over the coming years. I am quickly approaching my forties, and while I don’t know if I’ll ever be within normal weight limits for my height, I’d like to be twenty or thirty pounds lighter than I am now. I ended the day with a bit over 500 calories remaining, and over five days of banked calories now. Even if I only bank five days worth of calories per month, I’ll have around 160,000 calories remaining at the end of this project.

Jan 22 – Woke up early again, but after closer to seven hours of sleep. I am starting to feel like I’m just going to have to adjust to less sleep. They say you need less as you get older, right? I didn’t really feel hungry this morning, which is a nice change, though I did feel tired. When I’m tired, I instantly want to have a coke. That jolt of caffeine to get me started. A lot of people wince at that because they think of all the sugar in Coca-cola, but I don’t drink coffee or tea. I often drink iced tea, including the zero sugar kind, but I don’t think there is much caffeine in that. If anyone has alternatives that I could enjoy, please feel free to leave a comment below with your suggestion.

Jan 23 – Another night with a limited amount of sleep, and a headache, but such is life lately. At least it wasn’t minus a million outside today. It actually ice rained a fair bit. I had a hard time focussing today and getting anything done. It was brutal. I didn’t have any Coca-cola for the first half of the day. That saved me a few calories to spend in the evening for dinner. We went to Lone Star. Overall, it was kind of a rough brain day, but not a horrible eating day, but hopefully, tomorrow is better.

Jan 24 – I feel like five and a half hours to seven hours of sleep is all I’m going to get until our puppy gets older. Unfortunately, my work requires a ton of brain power to do well and make little to no mistakes. It is exhausting. I am planning on having a calorie restrictive day today in hopes of making sure my weigh in tomorrow looks as good as it can. I’ve been up the last couple of days, and I’m unsure exactly why other than I’ve been consuming a bit more sugar than normal. I am going to have another day without Coca-cola in hopes of reducing my sugar intake. For supper, we had McDonald’s again. I am disappointed that we still eat out so much, but I’ve been too tired to actively make food.

Jan 25 – This is why weighing yourself every day is a bad idea… I was frustrated that it was looking like this week I was going to weigh in higher than last week, but since today is my weigh in day, I stepped on the scale expecting it to stay the same or go higher than last week, only to see that I’m down another one and a half pounds since last week. That brings my total weight loss to 11.8 pounds since January 1st.

My approximate average weight since the summer of 2011 seems to be around 291 pounds. The lowest I’ve been since the same period of time was in 2013 when I got down to 269 pounds. I am currently 283.2 pounds. Can I, through mindful eating, get back down to my lowest recorded weight in nearly a decade? Even if I lost just under two pounds per month from here on out, the answer to that question would be “yes”. And that should be achievable with a calorie deficit of around 7,000 per month, increasing by around 200 calories per month with a December deficit of around 9,000 calories. The additional deficit is due to the fact that as I lose more weight, my BMR calculation will shift and I’ll potentially need fewer calories.

If I eat an average of 2,200 calories per day for the rest of the month, I’ll end up with a total calorie deficit of around 20,000 calories. If 3,500 calories were the equivalent of one pound of weight loss on average, then I’d have expected to lose nearly 6 pounds in January instead of around 12.

This starts to make sense though when you look at the original estimates for my total daily calorie needs. The tools were saying I’d need 3,400 calories per day to maintain my weight. That’s another 22,000 calories per month lower than what I’ve given myself. This makes for a total deficit this month of around 42,000 calories or around 12 pounds at 3,500 calories per pound.

Last night we went to Ottawa to see a Harry Potter Orchestra experience and on the way there we had A&W and at the event we had popcorn, and so I ended the day with 143 calories remaining.

Jan 26 – Woke up this morning feeling okay, despite going to bed at two and waking up before eight. I had more of my yogurt and protein oatmeal mix and it was good. I’m hoping to eat better today than yesterday, but we will see how it shakes out. The weekend is typically the hardest because during the week I have so much work to distract me, I don’t even notice when I’m hungry. We went to my Aunt and Uncle’s place for dinner and had smoked salmon and smoked roast beef with potatoes and green beans. It was so good. I overindulged a bit and had my largest single meal since starting this challenge at over 1500 calories in a sitting.