500 a Day to Keep the Pounds Away!

I found a great resource for figuring out how many calories you need per day, and what foods you should be eating. It's called www.mypyramid.gov Yes, it's a government website! But it has a lot of useful information about what we should be eating and how much. I was wanting to know how many calories I should be eating a day. I know I have my WW points system, but I wanted to know what I was eating in actual calories. As they say, weight loss is a result of your calories out vs. calories in. Actually, if you consume 500 less calories per day for a week (whether by eating less or exercising), you should lose 1 pound. I heard this on a Today Show segment last week and it sparked my curiosity about how many calories I'm consuming and burning off each day. I wear a heart rate monitor while working out so I know how many calories I'm burning. So then I wanted to know how many calories should I be consuming to maintain my weight, then subtract 500 to know how many calories I need to lose 1 pound per week.

So I went to mypyramid.gov and clicked on My Pyramid Plan and put my stats in (age, sex, height, weight, activity level) and it told me I should be having 2200 calories per day to maintain my weight. So I subtract 500 from that and I should be at 1700 calories per day.

So, each day I have the choice to cut 250 calories and burn 250, or cut 500 calories, or burn 500 calories and I should lose 1 pound per week. Today, I decided to burn the 500 during my workout. I did 10 minutes of high intestity on the Eliptical machine (100 calories), then I did my weight circuit lifting 18,105 pounds total (200 calories), then jumped back on the Eliptical for 20 minutes at high intensity (200 calories). Here's the results of my workout from my heartrate monitor:

Workout time: 1 hour & 15 minutes
In the zone: 47 minutes (between 93 - 158)
Average HR: 139
Maximum HR: 169
Calories burned: 526

It was an awesome workout and I did it all on my own! No classes today. Tomorrow is Step class again which of course I am looking forward to. Then I will do an Abs Lab for 20 minutes after that to put some extra focus on that problem area of mine.