It was a work in progress for years but I probably got a good grip on my weight by the time I left my teens, mostly by paying attention to how normal eaters ate. My brother, for one. Everyone always commented on how lucky he was, he could eat whatever he wanted without gaining a pound; I had to watch much more carefully. After a while, I couldn't buy that. My brother did eat more at meals than I did but he didn't hit the pantry 5 minutes after dinner the way I did. His second, even third, serving of chicken and rice did not equal my steady stream of brownies. Obvious when you say it but when you get up from a dinner table hungry and the seams of your jeans are stretched to the limit, you can feel like you're being unfairly targeted by cells from the fat side of the family tree. I read in one of my magazines (Glamour? What did I read then?) that a physically active teenage boy only needed about 300 more calories a day than a physically active teenage girl. Oversimplification, sure, but it sounded manageable to me for the long term. And my goal was long term. I also watched a girl I worked with at Friendly's. I don't remember her name but I remember how she ate and how she never said things like, "no ice cream for me this week" or "hit me if you see me touching a french fry!" She wasn't the only skinny waitress but she was the only one who didn't act like she starved herself to get there. She would eat a sandwich for lunch, maybe have a small sundae and would get back to work. Fascinating!
"She eats nothing," that was a huge compliment when I was in high school. A milestone for me was when I realized that healthy people can have healthy appetites.
Which brings me to weight maintenance calculators! Ha, that's what I sat down to write about anyway. I just discovered them online and they pretty much confirm what I learned back in the early 80s. Plug in your stats and a few different weights, it's amazing how small differences in calories can make such a big difference on the scale.
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