After two weeks of watching what I eat and exercising regularly, I'm down a total of about seven pounds. Two of those magically came off before I really started, so my progress in all accounts for five pounds.
Because I like to track this sort of thing, I asked my dietician to calculate my resting metabolic rate—this is (approximately) the number of calories used in keeping my organs alive and at the proper temperature...with what I guess are a few extra thrown in for the minimal activity we all engage in every day.
There are two ways to get this number: a treadmill and a respirator (which is expensive), or some javascript calculator widget (which is cheap). The calculator guessed I should be burning around 2300 calories each day, which takes into account obvious things like my size, age, and sex—but also factors in an extra fraction (in this case, 300) calories because my metabolic rate has been raised with regular exercise.
The heart rate monitor I've got tracks my approximate caloric burn rate, and since I've already got my meals fully tracked, it's fairly easy to see where the numbers are.
The chart at the top shows my total number of calories burned each day (red) as simply the sum of my resting rate and whatever my heart rate monitor guessed I burned during my workout. Subtract this from my food intake (blue), and you get the net calories (green). Each pound of fat amounts to ~3500 calories, and if you sum up the net caloric count, the prediction is that I should have lost 5.8 pounds over these two weeks.
From this, I'm gathering that these estimates are fairly accurate, and I'm building a bit of muscle. Or the estimates are waaay off and I'm already fully bulked up. Awesome.
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