Results of My Eight Week Reboot - Weigh In

My self-imposed eight week challenge is over. And I’m really, really glad I did it. I was stuck in a serious rut for a while - working out, eating right “most” of the time, and getting more and more pissed off that the scale wasn’t moving. I wasted a lot of mental energy being annoyed before realizing that I was eating more calories overall than I realized, despite tracking and doing okay from day to day.

Equal parts chocolate and asparagus.

I set my caloric goals to lose 1.5 lb/week which gave me 1000-1100 calories per day plus whatever I burned off in the gym. My actual daily calories came out to 1350. It’s higher than I wanted, but still translates to a pound a week, so I expected to lose at least eight pounds over these two months.

On June 9, I weighed 191.2. At the time, I thought some of that was bloat since it was a couple of pounds higher than the usual range. But, no matter. Yesterday, I weighed in at 184 even. Or to put it in chart form with fat and muscle numbers:

Measurements	6/8/2014	8/4/2014
Weight	191.2	184
Pounds Fat	82.7	74.5
Pounds Muscle	67.3	68.2

I definitely haven’t seen numbers close to that this entire year, so I’m happy to have some concrete progress. A little over seven total pounds in eight weeks, and eight pounds of fat gone from that. The scale isn’t infallible, I know. I weighed 185 in my kitchen and 184 in my bathroom, but it’s the best I can do. Time will tell where and how I’m really doing, but at this weight, where five or ten pounds lost doesn’t show, I want to know I’m making progress. And I've NEVER seen less than 40% body fat on the scale before.

Though my last official weigh-in was in the beginning of June, I’ve definitely sneaked a few peaks on the scale. It was hard not to look when I wanted so badly to see some validation of my efforts. Now I realize that I need to either get rid of the scale and bring it out once a month just to track long-term progress, or weigh myself regularly and learn to accept normal fluctuations. Standing on the scale while my husband wrote down the numbers did not work out, but it was an idea worth trying.

Good Changes and Improvements:

• Tracking my food and exercise honestly every single day for the last eight weeks
• Saying “no” more often to treats I didn’t need and didn’t even want - office cake, alcohol at cocktail hour, candy, french fries, second and third helpings
• Eating more consciously, even with junk food
• Going to the gym and pushing myself on the weight machines and the elliptical 4-5 times a week

Things I Should Work On:

• Bringing lunch to work - I would do this for two weeks, and then get lazy for another. Rinse and repeat
• Not weighing myself or at least not letting the number on the scale dictate my feelings
• Patience
• Ending sentences with prepositions

For now, I’m going to keep going the way I’ve been doing, but just try to push a little bit harder to lower my average calories. Those extra hundred or so came from two or three higher calories days, but mostly from little but completely unnecessary extra treats that added up to the difference between a pound loss a week and a pound and a half.

In other fun news, there's now a headless "before" shot of me on the About Me page.

My next mini goal is to be in the 170s by Labor Day, which give me about a month. For now, I’ll weigh in and report each week but there may be a bra/scale freedom burning in the future.

This is exactly how cool I am.

Reboot Week Two: I Don't Like Cupcakes

Week one is done! 

I averaged about a thousand net calories per day and felt confident. I packed lunch and a snack or two every day, we went to the gym four mornings and one afternoon, and I felt good and - most importantly - patient. Since I'm trying not to focus on the scale for a bit but still want to record my progress, I weighed in a couple of time by standing on the scale backwards so J could record the results without my seeing. I resisted the temptation to ask him “did it go down somewhat? Is it working?” for a third time, and we moved on.

Yesterday, however, was the only day that wasn't great food-wise. My mother, sister, and I drove to Connecticut to celebrate the bridal shower of a family friend. The bride is my age, we have known each other since we were born, and I love her dearly and was so excited to be celebrating with her. Her fiance is a great guy and they have been through everything together, including the rise and fall of MySpace.

I had a wonderful time and thought I was doing pretty well with eating until I actually tallied everything up. Then I realized that two mimosas, a mini quiche, a couple of slices of cheese and crackers, various salads with toppings and dressings, a few bite-sized desserts, all add up quick. I only took a little bit of everything, but the problem was the “everything” part. I was in default mode, version “let me have a little of that, it's okay because it's only a little.”

While I’d be quick to point out that my food intake would have been double that if I hadn’t been trying, that says more about how badly I have eaten in the past than how well I did yesterday. Despite not eating well, the only thing that really annoyed me was the second mini cupcake. It was fine, it was a cupcake, but it wasn’t amazing, cupcakes don’t even make my top ten desserts, and it really wasn’t worth it.

I know that a vague “I won’t eat too much” is setting myself up for disaster. It’s way too easy to grab a piece of cheese and a cracker and be totally unaware that this is the third one. I need to set reasonable goals, like choosing one dessert that looks the best and enjoying it. Then I can trust that there are going to be a lot of other desserts in life to enjoy, so it’s okay if I don’t have them all now. I'll try to keep this lesson for the rest of the events that seem to all fall within the next couple of months

This week is quiet, but next week is my firm’s annual outing, and a week later we’ll celebrate my grandparent’s 60th wedding anniversary. (Amazing, right? They are my role models.) Then there's another dinner, a weekend away, and another weekend away in the next seven weeks. I know that it would be fine in the long run to indulge a bit at these events, but I’m trying not to do so. This is supposed to be the more intense part of the meal plan, and trying all the foods is not a prerequisite to enjoying the company of family and friends. The biggest reason is that I’m just so unhappy with my weight right now, so dangerously close to that big round 200 number, that I don’t want to stall my progress anymore. Food choices like the ones made at the bridal shower won’t cut it. Therefore, while these are all happy occasions and I'm lucky to have so many, I don't need to celebrate them with food.

No weekly weigh-in since I don’t even know what I weigh at the moment. I did peek at the scale on Tuesday morning and I was down to 189, so maybe that last sucky weigh-in of 191 really was a bit of bloat. It doesn’t matter, since the next time I know my number will be in August.

Tentative Weekly Meal Plan:

	Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
Exercise	Short walk	Gym	Gym	Gym	Gym	Gym	Day of rest
Breakfast	Coffee, yogurt	Coffee, yogurt	Coffee, oatmeal	Coffee, yogurt	Coffee, hard boiled eggs with cheddar cheese	Coffee, yogurt	Coffee, yogurt
Lunch	Bridal shower	Turkey hash: turkey, carrots onions, peppers, and diced potatoes	Turkey hash, vegetable soup	Turkey hash, baby carrots	Taco salad - lettuce, refried beans, feta, onions, salsa, guacamole	TBD, or buy	TBD
Dinner	Eggs	Tortilla pizza	Hot dogs, broccoli	Omelette	Chicken breast, baked potato, veggies	Chicken, challah, vegetables, wine	TBD
Snacks	Shower food	Fruit, hard boiled egg, string cheese	Hard boiled eggs, strawberries	Fruit, string cheese	Fruit, string cheese

The "meal" of last week was the quinoa salad, and I had it for lunch Monday-Thursday. I would probably get sick of it if I had it another time, but the beauty of making one lunch dish a week and then eating it every day during the week is that I don't have to repeat often from week to week. My dish of this week, turned out like a hash (not the fun kind) made from diced potatoes, peppers, onions, and turkey breast. Like the quinoa last week, it’s a one-pot-meal.

Anyone else lukewarm for cupcakes? It's essentially the opposite of cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

Reboot Week One: Weigh-In and Meal Plan

Sunday was the first day of my “weight-loss reboot,” as I like to call it. I’m feeling good about all of this - finally realizing what’s been holding me back (spoiler: me) and changing it up. Most of all, I’m just looking forward to making some progress. It will be good for my health, both mentally and physically.

I’m on day 3, and so far feeling good. J (my husband) and I are still consistently going to the gym, and I’m learning that I can lift/push/pull more than I think, and also that consistently challenging my body will yield the most results. We’re also trying to increase the days per week that we go, from three or four to six days a week.

Food-wise, I made a tentative meal plan for the week and went grocery shopping. I like the idea a meal plan as it solves the nightly question of what to have for dinner in a way that’s much less likely to lead to a dinner of frozen french fries, baby carrots, and a veggie burger that’s been in the freezer since Thanksgiving. I can also make at least one big dish and structure the week around it - quinoa with black beans, feta, red onion and bell peppers this week, pan fried mahi mahi next, then turkey burgers, etc. Who knows?

It helps that this stricter plan of having just 1000-1100 net calories per day (plus non-starchy vegetables) is only for the next eight weeks. When I’m tired of doing it, or it gets really hard, I’ll remind myself that even though I’ll probably never be able to stop spending a certain amount of time and effort on weight-loss and maintenance, these will hopefully be the only days where there's so little room for indulgences.

Over the next couple of months, there will be a few happy but food-challenging occasions, including a bridal shower and my firm's annual outing at a country club. I’m going to make a plan, think about what foods are worth enjoying and what foods are better to pass on, and do my best.

Here’s the Tentative Weekly Meal Plan, with Sunday-today showing what I actually had:

	Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday -TBD
Breakfast	Coffee (sleep late)	Coffee, Greek Yogurt with honey	Coffee, Oatmeal with whole milk	Coffee and oatmeal	Coffee, Greek Yogurt	Coffee and oatmeal
Lunch	Oatmeal with peanut butter	Quinoa salad with feta, red onion, black beans, and bell peppers	Same as Monday	Vegetable soup with grilled cheese	Same as Monday	Same as Wednesday
Dinner	Garlic gnocchi with tomato sauce	Hot dogs on WW bread, pickles, carrots	Loaded baked potato	Veggie pizza	Loaded baked potato	Challah, roasted chicken, veggies
Snacks/ Prework	Chocolate milk, apple	Strawberries; toast with PB	Strawberries; string cheese	Strawberries, string cheese	Nectarines, string cheese	TBD

There may be more vegetables, we’ll see. My meal plan isn’t the most creative right now, but it’s foods I like and a plan I can follow.

While the good news is that I’m feeling confident for the next months (and years), there was a week or so gap between when I realized why I wasn’t losing weight, and finally starting this stricter plan. Unfortunately I got a little too much of the cursed “diet starts on Monday” mentality. I knew that I was still on my standard 1300/day plan, still working out, and there was no reason to go up in weight before I went down. But alas. I used the future diet as an excuse to have unnecessary indulgences and more than one “last hurrah” treat since I knew there wouldn’t be much room for treats, if any, on 1000 calories.

This brings me to the final weigh-in until August. J is going to log all the weight data, but I won't see it. As much as I would love to get to the 170's by the end of this, I don't want to get discouraged if the numbers don't follow.

Measurements	4/23/2014	4/30/2014	5/7/2014	5/14/2014	5/21/2014	5/28/2014	6/9/2014
Weight	188.1	188.3	185.8	187.2	186.5	187.8	191.2
Pounds Fat	79.5	81.5	78.3	79.1	78.5	78.6	82.7
Pounds Muscle	67.4	68.4	67.4	68.6	67.1	67.1	67.3

Not good at all. I hope some of that is bloat, but honestly I’m ignoring this number. It’s a “new” starting weight. Like I’ve said, feeling guilty about food and weight gain is utterly pointless (and is often an excuse for inaction). For the next 8 weeks, my focus will be on working out, eating well, and improving my eating habits.

Duh: Realizations and a New Plan

Based on my weight, body fat percentage and muscle percentage, I have made little progress over the last three months. We joined the gym in February and have been using it several times a week since, and I started tracking my food and limiting my calories in the beginning of March.

My body has definitely improved in those months: My waist and hips are a little trimmer, my arms and legs have more definition, and I feel that I’m stronger all around and have increased endurance. However, despite these minor physical changes, I’m basically still where I started three months ago.

I’ve been upset, and still hate seeing my rounded face in photos. I’ve tried not to think about how I had expected to lose twenty pounds by now, but instead I’m still wearing a 14 and size Large in most things and nobody who doesn’t know I’m trying to get into shape has seemed to notice any changes. So what gives?

Let me back up a moment.

My weight loss approach to each day has been simple: I can either have a “loss” day, in which I have a calorie deficit, a “maintenance” day, where I eat exactly the number of calories I would need to maintain my weight, which is about 1800 calories, or a “gain” day, where I go above the maintenance level. Every day I start over. It’s nice to know that I have the possibility of losing weight each day, even if it’s only a fraction of a pound. Each day’s weight losses or gains are negligible; but combined, they’re what adds up to fifty pounds gained or lost in a year.

Over these months, I’ve been aiming for a net of 1250-1300 calories, with Saturday and sometimes Friday at a maintenance  or lesser loss level, and 3-5 gym sessions per week. I’ve been pushing myself at the gym, and tracking perhaps five or six out of seven days, carefully weighing and measuring all my food and tracking it all in MyFitnessPal (leahb423, if you’re also on).

Most of these weeks have ended with me getting increasingly annoyed as the scale didn’t move. While I was frustrated at the lack of progress I felt I’d earned, I recently realized the obvious: I just haven’t been doing the math.

According to various Internet sources, I burn about 1800 calories in an average, no exercise day. Thus if I want to lose a pound a week, I need to eat about 1300 calories per day, plus whatever extra I’ve burned off. Alternatively, I could eat more on some days and less on others as long as the total weekly deficit adds up to 3,500 calories.

I think my stagnation boils down to a few simple things:

1) I let myself indulge, have a “maintenance” day on weekends where sometimes I didn’t even track anything

2) being satisfied with only a 200-350 calorie deficit for the other days

3) Two or three crappy, PMS-ing, bored, overeating days every month or so

Those things combined don’t steady weight loss make. If it takes a 3,500 calorie deficit to lose one pound in a week, and I only have a 1000-1750 calorie deficit from Sunday-Thursday, and then I allow myself a zero deficit day or a “lesser” deficit day - well, that’s maybe a pound or two a month. Combine that with sporadic splurging weeks where I end up with no deficit or, in the case of Passover, where I go over my calories, then there is not really any point where there is steady weight loss. Even with regular exercise.

This seems obvious as I write it, but somehow it didn’t hit me that the only way I could lose a pound a week on this plan would be to get that full 500-calorie deficit every day during the week.

Out of the many weight-loss mantras that I heard sprouted around the Internet and in Weight Watchers, one that stuck in my head was this: If you put in 80% of the work, you’ll get 80% of the results. With weight loss, just one or two hundred calories each day can be the difference between losing twenty pounds over a year, or gaining twenty. So maybe for weight loss, putting in 80% of the work can actually yield zero results. I got to the gym, I track most of the time, I weigh, I measure - that’s the 80%. But then I don’t track on one or two days, or I go a little over. That 20% is killing me.

To illustrate my point, I went back over a recent four-week period to see exactly what I’d been doing. Note this was a time when I was tracking almost everything, including the milk in my morning coffee, and working out, and felt I should have been losing weight - but wasn’t.

Four Week Period from April 28-May 25

• Week of Apr. 28-May 4
• 3 workouts
• Tracked 5 calorie deficit days, did not track two days
• Deficits ranged from 300-500

• Week of May 5-11
• 3 workouts
• Tracked 6 days, with an average of 400 over optimal weight loss caloric intake - some 200 over, one 600 calories over  

• Week of May 12-18 
• 5 workouts
• Tracked 5 days tracking, over from 50-300 on each day, 2 non tracking over days

• Week of May 19-25 
• 6 workouts 
• Tracked 5 days, over 100-200 for all days, with one day at over 500 above “losing” level

Ouch. Out of those 28 days, I didn’t track a full 25% of them, and went over the 1300 calorie limit on most of the days I did track. No wonder I’m not losing weight!

I’m tiring of being frustrated, and done doing this half-assed.

The new plan: 

I will aim to eat 1000-1100 net calories per day, and to exercise 5-6 days a week. On days I work out, I will eat back as many of those calories as I want or need.

This is the plan for the next eight weeks, starting on Sunday and ending on August 3rd. After those 56 days, I will see how I’m doing, see how I feel, and possibly up my daily calories. I probably don’t want to eat just 1000-1100 calories for the rest of the my weight loss journey, but for this little slice in time, where I’ve been pathetically, whine-nily treading for months, I need to start.

As a side note, J suggested that he track my weight for this time so I’m not focused on whether or not I’m losing enough. I decided that would be a good idea, so I will either wait the whole eight weeks or more likely, make him tell me after a month. Sometimes I can’t believe that my husband knows what I weigh, and that it’s now more than he does (shame), and he doesn’t seem to care, but this is just reason #423 why he’s a great husband.

Anyway. Join me as I finally kick this weight loss in the ass. Week 1 starts on Sunday.

It's stuck in your head now too.

Disclaimer: I am not a medical professional. I am doing what works for me. I am barely over five feet tall, and I personally don’t go by the assumption that 1200 net calories is a magical, universal number under which all women of all heights and builds will have their bodies slip into starvation mode.

Weekly Weigh-In: Work Events and Revelations

This is coming a bit late, but I've been trying to put some thoughts together from my results this week. Frankly, I've been doing this for three months and I'm not making close to the progress that I want to be making. I'm working out, I'm tracking, I'm trying. It's frustrating.

The positive side is that from this frustration came a much needed wake-up call. I looked over my history from myfitnesspal (I'm leahb423, feel free to friend me!) and here, did the math, and figured out some important things about my habits and (lack of) progress. The bottom line is this: despite tracking and working out, I’m just not eating on the calorie deficit I thought I was. I need to face that, and step the hell up if I want to stop maintaining. More on that later.

J and I spent the long weekend upstate with my family, and then I went to two different goodbye parties this week, one for a couple of departing co-workers and the other for a friend of ours who’s moving out of the country.

Overall it was a busier week than we’re used to - we’re usually at home most evenings - but really fun. I wasn’t as careful as I should have been over the weekend with my family, but we took a couple of lengthy walks and I tracked everything. 

I also felt pretty good and in control of myself at the two goodbye parties, aware of what I was eating and if it was worth it. I tried to focus on the people I was with and enjoy that instead of thinking about the delicious bar food available. Though the firm pays for an open bar at events like these, I stopped after two reasonably low calorie cocktails and switched to diet soda.

This is the opposite of our office motto.

In related news, due to the recent departure of two of my colleagues, I am now the most senior person of my position at my workplace. It’s not that strange, since paralegals usually cycle out after 2-3 years to go to law school or other jobs, but it’s a little unnerving that all the people I started with at my job are now gone and how quickly it changed. Thankfully, the people that have replaced them over the last year and a half are awesome, and I know how lucky I am to have a job, let alone a job with great people and that pays decently.

So here are the numbers from the week:

Measurements	4/23/2014	4/30/2014	5/7/2014	5/14/2014	5/21/2014	5/28/2014
Weight	188.1	188.3	185.8	187.2	186.5	187.8
Pounds Fat	79.5	81.5	78.3	79.1	78.5	78.6
Pounds Muscle	67.4	68.4	67.4	68.6	67.1	67.1

While I was not happy that my weight as a whole was up, fat and muscle numbers stayed the same, so maybe some of this is bloat. I worked out three times during the week, and am starting to add weight when strength training. Now I’m pushing/lifting/pulling more in the 40-50 range instead of the 30-40 range, so that’s progress.

Onto a new week, where we have ANOTHER Jewish holiday, celebrating when God gave the Jews the Torah (Bible) on Mount Sinai. How do we celebrate? Cheesecake, mostly. And blintzes. Thankfully this is the last one until the Jewish New Year in the fall.