This Weigh In Brought to You by Mozzarella Sticks

Happy Friday!

I am typing this from home as I took the day off to give John and myself enough time to get to D.C. today. I think I mentioned this, but this weekend we'll be attending the wedding of one of his old friends, so I get the interesting prospect of attending a wedding where I know neither the bride nor the groom. Another perk is that I get to see some college friends over the weekend, most of whom I haven't seen in years.

The goal I set out for myself last week was to track. It was a small goal, just focusing on this week. I think it would have been too much to make a goal of "start tracking today and then continue until you die or they invent some kind of autocounter."

I'm happy to say that I have been tracking this week! Even when I ate, dear God, NINE mozzarella sticks last night at our office happy hour for a departing colleague. Aside from last night, I've been eating at a good deficit this week overall.

This week's weigh-in:

	Start	6/8	8/19	10/29	12/31	1/28	3/31	4/21	5/5	5/12	6/7	6/18	6/24
Weight	200	191.2	182.6	181.4	177.2	174.6	168.4	170.4	172.4	171.8	174.4	169.8	169.8
Lbs. Fat		82.7	72.5	70.8	67.1	65.3	60.3	61.3	63.4	60.9	65	60.5	61
Lbs. Muscle		67.3	66.8	67.3	63.9	64.4	61.5	65	64	64.2	65.1	62.5	59.4

Aw, man, was hoping for something better. Keep in mind this weigh-in was before my private fried cheese party. But it's exactly the same as last week, except more fat and less muscle. Fail. Maybe the weekend before I started tracking was worse than I thought, or maybe it's one of another million factors. Either way, I need to work really hard this weekend not to go overboard. 

Even though I can see and feel that my waist has gotten smaller in the last couple of months, I still feel like I haven't made progress in months. My failure is consistency. I can be great for a few days, but those one or two crappy ones really throw me off. I need to be better, or learn how, to incorporate reasonable choices into those difficult food-moments - happy hours, weddings, and parties. 

Slow and steady wins the race, right? 

Weigh In and a Leaner, Meaner Leah

Life has been a bit busier around here. In terms of food, I would say I'm doing okay. That's the best I can describe. Not feeling out of control, not being tempted to eat a burrito for a second breakfast, but probably not doing as well as I can.

My most recent weigh-in:

	Start	6/8	8/19	10/29	12/31	1/28	3/31	4/21	5/5	5/12	6/7	6/18
Weight	200	191.2	182.6	181.4	177.2	174.6	168.4	170.4	172.4	171.8	174.4	169.8
Lbs. Fat		82.7	72.5	70.8	67.1	65.3	60.3	61.3	63.4	60.9	65	60.5
Lbs. Muscle		67.3	66.8	67.3	63.9	64.4	61.5	65	64	64.2	65.1	62.5

Woot! Back in the 160s - barely, but it counts. Now to just keep that trend going. Also, holy shit on apparently gaining and losing five solid pounds of fat. I'm assuming that's not quite accurate, but at the very least it shows how much I backtracked over those few weeks.

Some other highlights:

- At my Total Body Conditioning Class this week, the instructor told me that he saw a great difference in my body, and that it was inspiring for him to see someone doing that. I gotta say, that made my night. Since I've started taking his class, I've lost maybe a few pounds at most, but it seems that I'm still getting leaner!

- I've been the worst at bringing lunch. Not so terrible for calories, actually, since in midtown Manhattan, by law every third lunch place must be exclusively salads. However, it's very bad for my wallet.

- Next weekend John and I are going to an out-of-town wedding of a friend of his from high school. I've been to maybe 10 weddings in my adult life, but this will be the first one where I don't know the bride or the groom, let alone any of the guests. Should be interesting.

Guess which one I am?

        Number One Goal for this week: TRACK my food. My weight is down, so I must be doing something right, but I know that I'm not in a sustainable weight loss mode - plus, I'd like to lose a little faster. I need accountability, I need numbers and statistics so that I can make graphs.

Weight Loss - One Year Later

As of a couple of days ago, it’s been a year since I first started this journey. I technically started back in February 2014, but after losing little to no weight for four or five months, I looked at my Myfitnesspal tracker sometime last June and realized that I was eating a lot more than I thought. So I switched it up and got more careful.

Thus I think of June as my real “anniversary.” Despite certain weeks and even months during this year when I didn’t give a crap, and/or wasn’t eating well, I still think of this year as one coherent time of attempted weight loss. This is mostly because I never stopped, in my weird way, caring. Even when I didn’t give a crap, I did. I may also be biased because I hate the concept of “restarting on Monday” or similar second-chance plans.

So, one year later, what have I done?

	Weight	% Fat	% Muscle	Lbs Fat	Lbs Muscle
6/8/2014	191.2	42.8	34.8	82.7	67.3
6/9/2015	173.4	36.6	36.7	63.5	63.3
Difference	17.8	6.2	-1.9	19.2	4

In twelve months, I’ve lost just under twenty pounds of fat and also lost a few pounds of muscle. Percentage-wise, though, I’ve actually gained muscle.

If you told me a year ago that I’d lose twenty pounds over the next twelve months, I’d have been extremely disappointed and pissed. And it’s true, I really did want more from this year, and the “could have” and “should have” are dancing around my head. But twenty pounds is still twenty pounds, and even if it takes me a full additional year to lose another twenty, I’ll still make it eventually, right? Yes, it could have been forty or fifty, maybe it should have been, but I’ve realized that I could have just as easily ended the year with an extra twenty pounds.

It’s just so, so easy to be disappointed because I know I could have done so much better, but I know I still need to remember that it’s still progress - great progress, because virtually all the weight lost was pure fat - and that I should be proud of that.

All I can do now is focus on the next year. Of course, I’d like to get to goal, which is probably about another 45 pounds away. Maybe I can, maybe I won’t. But even if I don’t make it this year, I know I’ll make great progress towards that goal, and be in an even better place than I am now.

Right now, I’m doing pretty well. It’s weird, I’m not writing down my meals, just kind of going over it in my head. It’s easy since I’m not snacking. I know in the long terms I need to get back to tracking, but for now I’m feeling good where I am, and it’s working.

  I’m a couple pounds down from the gains of those few weeks, and confident I’ll be back in the 160s soon.

Highly Exciting: The Next Thirty Days

Have you ever wished that someone would take the thought out of dieting for you? That’s the idea behind multi-million dollar programs like Jenny Craig. Simple: Just eat their food, don’t eat anything else, and you’ll lose weight. Except that you never learn how to actually eat right or how to live in the real world.

Let’s get real here. I did not eat well over the weekend, much like the last few weekends have also been. This morning I was in at 175 even, so at least five or six pounds UP. Some is bloat but some is unfortunately just gained weight. Yuck.

By about a foot.

I don't think buying all diet food is worth the cost. However, I’d like to take the thought out of losing weight, just a little bit, and just for a little while. To (for most of the time) not worry about choices. Food has been such a huge focus for so long, and not in a good way - I’m either doing great, losing weight, and spending a lot of time and energy on it, or I’m eating terribly, and still spending a lot of time and energy on it.

I am stopping starting today (well technically yesterday this point), this morning. For the next 30 days I'm going on a more restricted diet. Take away the choice and the thought. I'm also putting the scale away so I'm not focusing on my weight. These next 30 days will be hard, but  I’ll do it because I know it's temporary and also because I'm at my wits end and need to go to the other extreme. After the 30 days, I’ll decide what's next. My plan is healthy - plenty of calories, veggies, fat, etc -it's just not sustainable because it's so limiting. That’s okay, I don’t need it to be long term. What I do need is a short term plan that will let me lose a bit of weight without having to focus so much on food.

So, the plan: I’ll give myself two options for breakfast, two for lunch and two for dinner. These choices will be things that I’ve eaten over and over again and still enjoy. Coffee with breakfast, always. Then oatmeal or Greek yogurt with honey. A lettuce/random veggies salad for lunch, with either beans, feta cheese, and a salsa dressing, OR with ground turkey and beans. Dinner will always have a veggie, and then be either flatbread pizza or two all beef hot dogs on whole wheat bread. Alternate is a frozen Amy’s entree. If I’m feeling genuinely hungry, I’ll have an apple and/or a glass of milk for a snack. Most importantly - no junk food, lots of vegetables, and little to no snacking.

Hot dogs as part of a diet? Yes. I know these are not all ideal options in terms of processing or sodium level, but they are meals that are really simple, easy, and keep me full. I’ll be adding veggies so it’s not quite the dinner plans of an eleven-year-old. Overall, I’d like to give this plan a chance, at least a week, before making adjustments to portions sizes or food choices.

This plan, this making decisions now about food so that I don’t have to later, won’t work 100% of the time. I’m not going to turn down having dinner with friends, or go to a restaurant and request that they cook me a hot dog and some broccoli. So, my plan for those times, maybe one or two meals a week, is to set a high but not insane calorie limit, and just stay within that. As long as it’s not more than a couple of meals, I should still have a good calorie deficit for the week.

I can't wait until I'm feeling motivated or inspired because who knows when that will happen? Right now I just feel determined. I need to start. I need to start somewhere, even if I know it doesn’t make sense in the long term.

Day one, May 26. Day 30, June 25.

The Meaning of Failure

So if it’s not obvious, I’m feeling a bit blah. At first it was because it felt like the scale wasn’t moving the way it should. Then I think I let last month’s holiday slip me up, and I’ve been, it seems, coasting ever since. My total weight loss for April is, according to the calories, less than a pound. Maybe not so bad considering the holidays, but… no. This past weigh in had me at 172.4. Somehow when I hopped on after a few lousy days, I had this idea in my head that it would be right back at 200. Even though rationally I know that I won’t gain 30 pounds in a week, no matter how badly I eat, a few days or weeks off can still leave me feeling like I “deserve” to gain it all back.

You know how they say that on the days you really, really don’t want to go the gym, when all you want is to lie in bed without pants, watching Netflix and order some kind of greasy takeout, that that’s the time you need the gym most? Or that when you least want to talk about something, it’s when you really should be talking?

That’s me right now. I don’t really want to talk about how I’m struggling, how I’ve been struggling and often failing at eating well over the last couple of weeks. How I’ve had a couple of days where I eat great during the day, proudly bypass the cookies at work, and then end up buying a brownie while grocery shopping and eating it in the kitchen as soon as I get home. It’s almost an interesting psychological process. As I’m eating, I’m thinking, “Hmm, this is really not in line with my weight loss goals. This is like 500 calories of butter. Am I actually enjoying this? Why am I eating this? I should probably stop eating this.” It’s not a mean or yelling voice, more of a soft one that’s asking these questions in a vaguely curious tone of voice.

Rather, I just want to stop struggling somehow. But I don’t think that’s how things happen.

But maybe I do need to talk about, to express the frustration at myself when I do things (or more specifically, eat things), that are directly contrary to my long-term goals.  I’m at this weird stage where I’ve come so far, but I still have so far to go. I’m reminded of that when my fall coat from two years and twenty pounds ago doesn’t fit right, when I see a photo of myself that’s so much better than one from a few years ago, but still so far from where I want to be.

This stage is also, I know, a turning point for me. How many times in my life have I slowed, then stopped my weight loss efforts after those first 20-30 pounds? Too many. It’s terrifyingly easy to give up, to stop spending so much time and energy on this. Even though I love the idea of not having weight loss be this focus in my life, I know that will end with me digging out my old 16s.

Someone noticed I hadn’t posted in a while and emailed me about starting over and having another “day one.” I thanked them for thinking of me, but told them that I don’t - I can’t - think of these last couple of weeks as failures that require “starting over” now. This is one long effort, one long weight loss process that is, in fact, so long that it can have full weeks of failure. The last couple of sucky weeks are just part of it.

During this time, John’s been watching me mope around, and listened as I lamented the latest cookie or was as proud of not eating a cookie as a person might be at passing the bar. He told me that even if I gain during this period, it’s better than giving up and not caring. Basically, anything is better than giving up. Giving up would mean that I have failed, while trying and failing, or, hell, not trying but still caring, means that I’m still trying. Still going to the gym after the cookie is trying.

In case you missed it above, these are the latest stats:

	Start	6/8	8/19	10/29	12/31	1/28	2/25	3/31	4/7	4/14	4/21	5/5
Weight	200	191.2	182.6	181.4	177.2	174.6	177	168.4	170	168.6	170.4	172.4
Lbs. Fat		82.7	72.5	70.8	67.1	65.3	66.5	60.3	60.8	58.8	61.3	63.4
Lbs. Muscle		67.3	66.8	67.3	63.9	64.4	68.2	61.5	61.5	62.7	65	64

So day 300 of infinitely, let’s go.

Weekly Weigh-In: Lowest Fat to Date!

This week's weigh-in:

	Start	6/8	8/19	10/29	12/31	1/28	2/25	3/4	3/10	3/17	3/24	3/31	4/7	4/14
Weight	200	191.2	182.6	181.4	177.2	174.6	177	175	173.6	172.4	172	168.4	170	168.6
Lbs. Fat		82.7	72.5	70.8	67.1	65.3	66.5	64.6	65.1	62.7	62.7	60.3	60.8	58.8
Lbs. Muscle		67.3	66.8	67.3	63.9	64.4	68.2	64.1	66.2	65.3	62.7	61.5	61.5	62.7

So I'm basically back down to where I was two weeks ago. Considering "there" was four pounds down, I'm happy with it. 

But the great thing is the fat! For the first time, I have less than sixty pounds of fat on my body, and it's being weighed out by muscle by more than a few ounces. 

I feel different - my hips and waist are more narrow, and my jawline and thighs are more defined. I still have my stomach, which I think is where I carry most of my weight. Looking forward to that leaving.