Upping my calories

Every few weeks, I get really unsure of myself and what I'm doing. Even though I'm still seeing 1-2 pound drops in my weight each week, I sometimes wonder if I'm doing this correctly. From the very beginning, I've been struggling with how many calories to consume each day. Most of the time I keep it around 1200, give or take a hundred, depending on the day.

There are a lot of tools on the web to help you figure this stuff out. Unfortunately, they all give me different answers. For example, I went to the "weight loss calculator" on the MSN site and told it my current weight and my goal weight. It informed me that in order to lose 10 more pounds by April 29th (that's 1 pound per week), that I need to eat 2111 calories per day, which seems way too high. Another site's calculator told me 1900. Another told me 1700. It's hard for me to believe these things. Of course, I've heard a million times that if you drop your calories too low, your body holds onto fat in an effort to conserve energy. However, I'm still losing, so I didn't think that was happening to me.

I'm really not sure what to do. I'm very happy to have that appointment with the nutritionist coming up. It will be nice to hear from a professional how much I should be eating.

The truth is, I'm hungry a lot. Or at least I think it's hunger. My notion of what hunger is has gotten so screwed up. There are often times when I honestly can't tell if I'm hungry, or if I just want the "taste" of food, or maybe I'm bored or pissed off, etc. I do feel like I deprive myself, though. This occurs mainly in the afternoons when I'm at work. I have a small snack but I still feel ravenous.

So, I'm going to try increasing my intake a bit. I'm really nervous about it, for the obvious reason that I'm scared I'll put weight back on. I'll probably see a temporary gain for a few days until my body adjusts, then hopefully it would go back down. I know I'm not going to gain 94 pounds back overnight, so I just need to take it day by day and see how it goes.