Last Weight of 2014 and No, Zip, Nada New Year's Resolutions

In our house, the end of 2014 involved the kind of cold medicine they use to make meth, tea with honey, and snot. We both got sick, and it wasn’t too fun. The good news (or the bad news, I can’t tell) is that I was sick over New Year’s, when I had off from work anyway so I didn’t have to use up personal/sick days. Hence the delay in reporting my final weigh in, which is below.

I relaxed a bit while sick, but kept tracking and averaged about 1400-1500 for those days. I’m okay with that, especially considering the break from exercising and generally going outside that was happening.

I want to talk about the fourteen resolutions I have for 2015. Nope, kidding. I can’t do New Year’s resolutions. I get them, I understand why people make them - new year, new opportunity, new you. Blank slates and all that.

They bother me simply because I wonder, why are we waiting for the calendar to give us a new start? We should just fucking take it. Now. Right now. For whatever it is that we’re trying to do. On December 28th, or April 14th, or if it happens to be January 1st, then January 1st is fine too. Waiting till January 1st is like "starting on Monday." I guess this is more relevant in the middle of May than the beginning of January, but I digress. 

The most common resolution in the U.S. involves weight loss. Anyone who attends Weight Watchers meetings or goes to a gym can see the crowds of "resolutioners".  Weight-loss hipsters - people who have been on weight loss plans for more than six weeks - don’t like resolutioners. They sniff at the crowded gyms, at the optimistic Facebook statuses, and then laugh evilly that they’ll all be gone in a month or two anyhow, and go back to eating air popped popcorn and taking walks during lunch.

I don’t want to be a weight loss hipster. Because in reality, people don’t fail at their weight loss resolutions for any exciting reasons that have to do with when they were made, but rather because of the same reasons that people might fail at weight loss in general - too much too soon, no plan of action, no specific goals, not setting up their environments or a million other small things. So I’d like to treat anyone who’s made a New Year’s resolution to lose weight with the same attitude as I would treat anyone who’s trying to take control of their weight, because that’s a hard thing to do no matter the time of the year. Sure, maybe most people will stop using their gym memberships. But not everyone will.

Back to my weight: Here is the last weigh-in of 2014. Since it’s the last one, I’m just going to compare it to my first weigh-in back in June, and last week’s.

	6/8	12/24	12/31
Weight	191.2	179.6	177.2
Lbs. Fat	82.7	69.5	67.1
Lbs. Muscle	67.3	68	63.9

Finally, real progress! Two pounds down, and the fat measurement agrees with the net weight. Muscle is way weird, but it changes so much from week to week that I don't usually give it much attention. I’ve been frustrated the last couple of weeks, so it’s good to see the number reflecting that.

I would love to reach my goal weight in 2015 (does that make me a resolutioner?), but I’m also trying really hard to not have that as an expectation. Life happens, my losses so far have been kind of slow, and I especially don’t want to diminish whatever weight loss I do achieve. My current goal is to get into the 160s by mid-February, my 26th birthday. Last week I decided to focus more on fat than the net number on the scale, so my “real” birthday goal is to have under 60 pounds of fat on me by that time. That’s just seven pounds and change, and a bit over six weeks away. I can get there, or at least pretty close. If all the weight that comes off between now and then is fat, I’ll accomplish both.