Welcome to another edition of the Half-Size Me Audio Blog series. I am Heather, and today's

audio blog is how my body media band helped me trust myself. When you have battled your weight

your entire life and been on and off diet since you were a kid, the last thing you feel

comfortable with is trusting yourself in regards to when you're hungry,

full, and content. You overthink everything in regards to food. You anticipate when you're

going to be hungry. You fear getting too hungry, and then you fear eating too much. It is a scary cycle.

I would work out on Saturday mornings for about an hour and a half and come home starved. I was trying to cut back on my calories on Thursdays and Fridays in order to make my weighing gold. So every Saturday, I would find I was wanting to eat between 2,600 calories and 3,000 calories due to my extreme hunger after a long workout. I would feel terrible about this the next day.

Why was I so weak? Why was I not able to stay at the 2,200 calories or less since that is what a woman

my size with my activity level should be eating to maintain her weight? I would then eat much less other days of the

week to get my calories to balance out based on what I thought I was supposed to be eating. I was

genuinely hungry on Saturday and I felt trapped in the cycle of eating what I needed or felt I needed

and panicking about the number of calories. then feeling the need to cut way back the other

days and becoming very hungry yet again. Then one day, I started researching body recomposition,

total daily energy expenditure, basal metabolic rate, weightlifting, and found that there were many

women my size or even smaller that were eating much more than I was

and losing inches and transforming their body. I found new online calculators that gave me much,

much higher calorie goals for the day, and it made me begin to question how much of what I

had been told or had seen in regards to calorie requirements for weight maintenance

was accurate. I felt I had seen and received so much conflicting information in relationship to

calorie goals that I wanted to find out my own personal data to put my mind at ease. I wanted to know

what I really needed in a day for my activity level and my stats,

not just some number based on the average woman on an online calculator.

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