It’s been almost a month since October’s update, and there are a lot of exciting things happening. I’ve been working pretty hard at keeping track of my weight as well as kicking my exercise into high gear and doing something akin to training.

In terms of diet, I’ve been completely lax on what I’ve been eating, but I’ve been working pretty hard at keeping an idea of how many calories I’ve been eating though. I’ve been watching and recording exactly what I eat for most days, and according to the BMR rates that are available basically everywhere I am eating at about 500 calories below the rate to maintain weight. While my goal is to maintain weight, I wanted to be sure that I wasn’t going to start gaining again, and ensure that I stay below 230. So far, it’s been successful, as you can tell by the chart.

The chart says that the 500 calories that I was below the maintenance calories weight is actually accurate, according to the trend line. However, I think that I’m not going to change my diet goals until 2012 rolls around. Partly because it’s the holidays coming up and that causes a bunch of extra eating that I can’t really track, and also I’m not really sad about still losing some weight at the lower rate that I am now. I’ll be happy to eat some less in order to make up for some of the awesome pumpkin pie that is the sign of the season.

Speaking of eating a lot at occasions, I am trying to eat more intuitively lately, attempting to get a good gauge of when I am full and don’t need any more food. I’ve tried a few times now, and it’s been a bit hit and miss. Some times I will eat a lot less than I should, and be overestimating the calories, but I am just not hungry or something. Usually those are the days where I was actually eating less in preparation for knowing that I will have an unknown amount of food later in the evening. Other times, I will still be hungry, or at least have a hunger feeling, and then I will be eating more than I actually need to. One time I actually ate to the point where I felt sickly overfull. I’m trying to learn to listen to the body signals so that I can train myself to eat without watching every single calorie. I’m going to try to do it more throughout the holiday season, because it is definitely the season where there are a ton of these events where you can’t exactly ask for a recipe or nutrition facts.

This month, I had my yearly checkup at the doctor’s office as well. There was only good news in the experience, and every person that I met was complimentary and seemed happy. The receptionist said that I lost weight because of the difference in pictures on my license. The doctor’s assistant who took my weight, blood pressure and height was entering the stats into the computer, and she asked “You’ve lost 26% of your body weight in the last year?” kind of quizzically. The computer was actually alerting her that it might have been a typo because it was a large change from the last year, she showed me the screen. Finally, the doctor himself was highly complimentary and asked about how I lost the weight, and used the word “impressive” to describe the weight loss a bunch of times.

Speaking of the doctor’s visit, I got some weird looks at the office because I was there in a running outfit. I took advantage of the relative location of the office in order to get a run in that wasn’t one of my normal weekly runs, and took this route home. Running has been my main exercise goal since I started focusing on it more intently in the last month, and I’ve been rocking it out over the last month.

While I stated last month that I was going to start focusing on exercise instead of diet as much, I didn’t expand on how I was actually going to get it done. My current training plan is focused around cardiovascular interval training, with a goal to run some 5km races without stopping under 30 minutes in the spring of 2012. In order to increase my endurance, I do a fairly simple routine, of a 5 minute warm-up walk, followed by a set of intervals where I walk for 2 minutes, and then I run for some amount of time. Right after I finished my last report, I was running for 1 minute 45 seconds. Every two weeks, I increase the amount of running time by 15 seconds, which means that my most recent runs were for 2 minutes 15 seconds.

As I run for longer, I am getting faster as well, probably just because the percentage of running time is going up. I’ve increased my time on the standard running route from almost 50 minutes to almost 45 minutes, which is a big deal for me, because 45 minutes is a threshold point for me to shake things up a bit. This is getting a bit long, so I think I’ll make it one of the topics for next month.