Thursday, January 28, 2010

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.

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