HMR Diet - 7 days until I start

Ok, so I start my HMR liquid diet fast in 7 days.  I get a little more nervous each day as I get closer.  I looked online at a couple of sites that offer flavor extracts to add to the shakes to improve or give them additional flavor.  That should hopefully take care of some of the worries I have of getting burned out on the same flavors day after day.  For example there are cake batter and peanut butter flavorings that I could add to either the vanilla or chocolate shakes.  There's amaretto flavoring too.  I'm hoping I'll luck out and find General Tso's or steak and potato flavorings but I'm not going to hold my breath.

Here's the "math" behind the program from what I've gathered so far.  I'll be allowed a minimum of 800 calories a day; each shake being 160 calories and a minimum of 5 shakes a day.  While on the program you are to burn at least 2000 calories a week with exercise.  So over the course of a week you'd take in a minimum of 5,600 calories and from that you can subtract the 2,000 calories you burned from exercising which leaves you with a net of 3,600 calories.

The first part is done, we now know how many calories we'll be dealing with on a weekly basis if we just did the minimum.  Now we need to figure out how many calories your body needs to maintain your existing weight.  If you are a mail and weigh 270 pound that would be 3,240 calories.  So now we'll take that number and multiply it by 7 to determine how many calories you would need an a week to maintain your current body weight.  In this case that would be 22,680 calories.

Now the fun part.  You take the 22,680 and subtract the 3,600 calories that we are now dealing with to come up with our caloric deficit, 19,080 calories. You must create a deficit of 3,500 calories to lose a single pound of body fat.  So we'll take that 19,080 and divide it by 3,500 to determine roughly how many pounds we could expect to lose in the first week which just so happens to be 5.45 pounds.  For the next week you'd take your new current weight and do the math over again.  This isn't an exact science but it will give you an idea of what to expect.

When I do the math it comes out to roughly 55-60 lbs.  I honestly cannot fathom losing that much weight in 13 weeks let alone a year.  Part of my my doubt about this is the fact that I highly doubt I can get by with only 800 calories a day and will probably have 7-8 shakes a day.  I guess we'll start to see how things will turn out starting next Thursday.

Update - Starting Again

Well a lot has changed since I last posted.  My father passed away very unexpectedly and I became engaged.  Before my dad had passed I was in a good routine of eating healthy, cutting portion sizes, and exercising a minimum of 4 days a week an hour at a time.  Since then I really haven't done much.  Enter a couple of new medical issues and now the doctors are once again on my case about losing weight. 

My doctor suggested I start the HMR Diet that one of the local clinics offer.  I'll get into more detail about HMR and their offerings later but from the research I've done they offer a couple of different programs targeting various levels of weight loss. The most stringent, which I've been asked to do, is a complete liquid diet fast that lasts 13 weeks under medical supervision.  They say the average amount lost during the 13 week program is 50-60 pounds. I would definitely be ok with those numbers as I wouldn't have weighed that since my freshman year in high school. 

I'm hoping to document as much as I can here since there really isn't a whole lot of information available online from people who've actually done one of the HMR programs. My biggest fear is not eating solid food. That's a valid concern from what I've read on the few blogs out there where people have talked about this program but most have said that goes away after the first week. My other fear is that you can get very sick if you don't transition from the liquids to solid food properly.  I've spoken with the people who run the program at the clinic and from what they've told me the transition really starts a couple of weeks before the program ends.

I'm going to wrap this up for now but I'm going to make it a personal goal of mine to post as much information as possible not only about the program but of my progress as well.