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.

Self-Sabotage and "Deserving" to Lose Weight

After I posted last week, I was feeling great. The next four or five days I was wonderfully on track - I ate well, went to the gym, and overall felt in control. No office cake for this lady!

Then I screwed up yet again over the weekend, and I’ve been trying to get back ever since. Are you as sick of reading about this as I am of feeling this way?

Maybe it’s the Psych major talking, but I spend a lot of time analyzing my emotions. In this case, my overeating was systematic and deliberate. It was almost that I was actually making sure I wasn’t eating well. Why the self-sabotage?

Maybe I don’t think I deserve to lose this weight - to be healthy, to look better and feel better. That would be a self-esteem issue. Or maybe there’s a part of me that seriously doubts my ability to actually lose the weight and, more importantly, keep it off. So that part of me, in its infinite wisdom, is willing me to give up before I start, so I don’t waste all this time and energy. That one also mostly comes down to self-esteem.

Whether it’s one of those reasons, or some other deep-seeded psychological issues that will only be revealed under deep hypnosis, the end result is that I’m still really struggling. My goal at this point is to just not go crazy. Last month when I was also struggling, my goal was just to not go backwards, and I was able to do that. I need to keep that up now, and to remember that I do deserve this. Everyone deserves to be healthy, including me. I just have to earn it.

This weekend is yet another Jewish holiday, ones that ostentatiously revolves around cheesecake and blintzes (don’t ask). I will probably be surrounded by food from Friday night through Monday night, but not be able to track or go to the gym. Sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Based on how much I’m dreading the food part of this holiday, I think I’ve lost a lot of faith in myself. The faith that I can be in this for the long term, that I can beat the appallingly bad statistics on successful weight loss and maintenance, is quite fucking important. It what makes you keep going after you make a mistake.

I have no plan for the holiday, honestly. I have told the husband that I’m not in a good state of mind, food-wise, and he should be aware of that so he can gently ask me if I actually want that [calorie bomb]. John’s also very useful in meals - if I take a piece of bread without thinking, and then realize or decide that I don’t want it, I can pass it to him. He’s a slim guy with a big appetite. This is helpful because I can change my mind about food without trying to awkwardly put it back, or feel like I’m wasting it.

However, after this holiday, when the time is mine again and the weather continues to be lovely, I am going to take a hard, honest look at myself. I need to make progress again, for my sanity as well as my health. I’m considering doing a Whole30 or some other short term limiting diet. Going to one extreme for a little while can help to find a balance. I am usually willing to try any reasonable meal plan, as long as I don’t have to buy any special products. But the bottom line is that I need to refocus, and also actually work on my relationship with food. 

Healthy people don’t eat cake because of weird psychological reasons that they need to analyze, but just because cake is delicious. I’d like to be one of them.

Weekly Weigh In - Getting Off the Blah Train

This week’s stats:

	Start	6/8	8/19	10/29	12/31	1/28	3/31	4/7	4/21	5/5	5/12
Weight	200	191.2	182.6	181.4	177.2	174.6	168.4	170	170.4	172.4	171.8
Lbs. Fat		82.7	72.5	70.8	67.1	65.3	60.3	60.8	61.3	63.4	60.9
Lbs. Muscle		67.3	66.8	67.3	63.9	64.4	61.5	61.5	65	64	64.2

So fat is way down while muscle mass maintained. Good numbers, considering. I don’t know how much of the net gain is actual weight from my time overeating, and how much is bloat, but either way I’d like it to go away.

Sunday was Mother’s Day. My mom is the best, and my siblings and I planned to make a big homemade dinner with my parents and grandparents to celebrate. Since she loves Italian, we decided to make soup, pizza with fun toppings, and some veggies. Also, mojitos because those are the best.

I’ve kept up my baking hiatus in general, and I know that making vegetables instead of desserts for social gatherings has probably saved me approximately 24329 calories in “I have to eat one to make sure it’s good.”

The siren song of miniature chocolates

But for some reason my brain went out the window and I was all, “I’m going to make lava cakes for dessert! And we’ll get some fancy $14-a-pint Tahitian vanilla bean ice cream to go with it!” My plan to not go overboard was “Don’t go overboard.”

"We need a plan of attack!"

Fail. Why do I keep doing that? Why do I forget that I need planning, and rules, or I’ll just snack/taste throughout the day and not really realize how much I must have consumed until it’s hours later? I picked at the chocolate chips, and split a “test” pizza with my brother and sister. (We used this recipe for pizza dough; it was amazing.)

I have my go-to rules - no snacking and no seconds. I wish I had just stuck to that. One small lava cake at dinner, even adding ice cream to make a 400-calorie dessert, could have been a nice treat that was part of a wonderful celebration of my mother and grandmother. Instead, I compounded that with at least three servings of chocolate chips and tastes of batter. I need to be more mindful of situations like that - I seem to be super mindful after it happens, of course. But that’s not really even mindfulness, that’s just acknowledging my mistakes. Mindfulness has to come before the food to count and to accomplish anything.

I want to start making progress again, not just stagnant at this awesome but insufficient thirty pound loss. I think a great way to do this is focus on small things, and also to remind myself of the good things I am doing, even if and when I’m not perfect. I’m still going to the gym consistently, I am doing well in not being in denial over how many calories or how much I ate, and most importantly, I’m still trying, still caring, and still pushing myself to do better.

Goals for this Week:

• Track all food and drinks, no matter what
• Go to the gym at least three more times before Sunday, ideally four
• Remember that the delicious chocolate in the office candy bowl is the result of horrible human conditions and mass environmental destruction and I don’t want it
• Don’t have cake at the office farewell on Thursday
• This is actually the first “farewell” we’ve had in at least six months. Back when we had a whole slew of farewell cakes, I got used to just not having any and not caring that I wasn’t. I know that it’s not worth it, cake is not something that excites me, so I just need to do that.

What are your strategies for being healthy or healthier this week?

Weekly Weigh-In: Post Birthday

On the bad side, this was a bad week. I really struggled just to break even, and didn’t even manage that. On the good side, I turned 26, tracked everything faithfully, and this is the first bad week I’ve had in months. By my estimates for the end of the week, I was over by about half a pound. Then I got on the scale:

	Start	6/8	8/19	9/30	10/29	11/19	12/31	1/28	2/4	2/11	2/18
Weight	200	191.2	182.6	181	181.4	177.6	177.2	174.6	175.8	174.2	178
Lbs. Fat		82.7	72.5	70.3	70.8	68.1	67.1	65.3	66.8	64.7	67.4
Lbs. Muscle		67.3	66.8	65.2	67.3	63.3	63.9	64.4	65.2	63.5	64.2

Urgh, that’s pretty appalling. I know it’s not real - or at least not all of it is real. This weigh in came after an awesome new gym class followed by strength training (woot, I went to the gym on my birthday!), followed by a wonderful, delicious, sodium and French fry filled meal I shared with some friends for my birthday. So while I may have eaten one or two thousand extra calories this week, it was not, dear God, twelve thousand.

Despite this logic, I was pretty upset this morning. Not going to eat in rebellion or smash my scale, just angry.

Right back on the horse today, feeling good. Had another good workout and stayed in my calories. I’m resisting the temptation to weigh in again tomorrow in order to ensure myself that the bloat is going away. The above, what I wrote, is my weight this week, whatever that means. But it sure as hell won’t be my weight next week, or next month.

Obviously my goal of making it to the 160s by my birthday feels like a cruel joke (remember how optimistic I was?)

More later, right now I’m long overdue for a good night’s sleep.

A Milestone Hit, and Why Weight Loss is Not Black and White

This week didn’t start out great, and didn’t end wonderfully, but overall it was a good one because I worked to work within the flexibility of my eating plan, and I think it was good practice for weight loss under (almost) all circumstances.

My plan is simple: eat a minimum of 1000 calories per day, plus any calories burned while working out. Those calories, plus another 2000 “weekly” calories that can be split up however I want allows me to average 1300 calories per day. That adds up (er, down) to a pound loss every week - but with a lot more flexibility than a standard 1300 calories/day plan.

The only issue with this is that if I eat a lot on Wednesday, the first day of my week, I spend the rest of the week playing catch up. That’s what happened this week, so by Saturday, I was out of weekly calories and would have needed to net 1000 calories every day until it reset on Wednesday. Not easy, and probably not going to happen without a lot of planning, and workouts.

Here's where the flexible part came in most, and it applies to any weight loss plan. So I've said this before, but it should be said over and over again: weight loss is so not black and white. There are many areas between “lose a pound this week” and “gain a pound this week.” Yes, ideally I’ll follow my plan and have an average 500 calorie deficit each day, for a weekly calorie deficit of 3,500, which is a pound. But if I end up with a 3,000 calorie deficit, or even a 2,500 calories deficit, that’s still a loss.

So as much as I really, really, want to try and get that 3,500 calorie deficit each week, it’s not always going to happen. On the last day of my food week, Tuesday, I was at a deficit of 2,200. But I realized that just wasn’t feasible to eat at the calorie level that my plan dictated, so I decided to let myself eat up to a full 1,800 calories for the day - maintenance level. That way I could eat a decent amount, but not have it spill over onto other days and still end up with that 2,200 calorie balance. I could even theoretically have eaten 4,000 calories that day and broken even for the week because of the previous deficit.

The results of yesterday’s weigh in:

	Starting	6/8	8/19	9/30	10/29	11/19	12/24	12/31	1/7	1/14	1/21
Weight	200	191.2	182.6	181	181.4	177.6	179.6	177.2	176.6	175.8	174.8
Lbs. Fat		82.7	72.5	70.3	70.8	68.1	69.5	67.1	66.9	67.6	66.5
Lbs. Muscle		67.3	66.8	65.2	67.3	63.3	68	63.9	63.9	65	65.1

Awesome, another pound down! It's more than I was expecting, because I did not have a pound's worth of calorie deficit this week, but since when does the scale perfectly reflect the last seven days? Still a win. This means that I have officially lost 25 pounds from my highest weight. (Hopefully the next 25 won't take as long.) Fat isn’t cooperating as much, but it’s back down from last week, and I’m really happy.

In other news, I realized that between drafts and published posts, I have 99 posts. So I got 99 posts, but… actually I have no idea how to finish that. Help?

Weekly Weight: Down Again!

Here's the weekly number:

	Starting	6/8	8/19	9/30	10/29	11/19	12/17	12/24	12/31	1/7
Weight	200	191.2	182.6	181	181.4	177.6	179.2	179.6	177.2	176.6
Lbs. Fat		82.7	72.5	70.3	70.8	68.1	68.4	69.5	67.1	66.9
Lbs. Muscle		67.3	66.8	65.2	67.3	63.3	67.3	68	63.9	63.9

Excellent, down by another half pound! My expectations were low since I was sick for half the week and didn't move at all, let alone exercise, so I'm especially happy.

A few random bullet points: 

• Today, I wore another pair of pants that a year ago I couldn't even zip up. I think they were maybe borderline too tight in some places, but the waistline fit great and I was too excited not to wear them. "Why, these old thing that look like generic black slacks? Yes, they are part of this magical day!"
• I've been putting the scale away during the week and just checking in on Wednesdays. I think it's much better for now. It forces me to not focus on the number because you can't focus on what you don't know. I do still like to check in weekly, but those daily reminders were helping more than hurting. 
• I have six weeks left until my time goal to hit the 160s. Maybe I can actually do this!
• I was crazy sore yesterday. Is that what happens when you don't walk farther than the distance between your bedroom and the kitchen for four days, and then do some strength training and cardio? 
• We've starting watching Star Trek (though Jay has already seen most of them) and it's awesome. 
• I'm glad everyone is obsessed with Serial because there's many fascinating analyses to read. 
• I just realized I have 69 posts from 2014. Totally an accident - even my unconscious mind is in the gutter.
• Winter is here. Everything is cold. I hate it. 
• My father-in-law lives in LA, and he likes to mock us by sending photos of his wife and himself on warm sunny bike rides on the beach.

Weigh-In: Special Events Have Diminishing Returns

This week’s weigh-in:

	6/8	8/19	9/30	10/29	11/6	11/19	12/3	12/10	12/17
Weight	191.2	182.6	181	181.4	179.6	177.6	181	179	179.2
Lbs. Fat	82.7	72.5	70.3	70.8	70.3	68.1	71.4	66.9	68.4
Lbs. Muscle	67.3	66.8	65.2	67.3	65	63.3	68.7	64	67.3

So we’re at basically the same as last week, which is what I was expected. This week was hard; there was the happy hour, a potluck, another party, and I had trouble staying on track. I tried, but it’s sad how quickly you (or rather, I), can eat several hundred calories worth of fries. The upside is that I tracked everything, and had some good days and great choices that balanced out the bad.

Yesterday, they had a staff appreciation events, which simply equal two giant cakes. And I kept my no office food rule and didn’t have any! I didn’t even care that I didn’t have any → even bigger victory.

This week there are more challenges: it’s a Chanukah party on Saturday night, two meals with friends before that, and probably a lot of food at the office. Awesome events with awesome people, but definitely challenging food-wise. Especially Chanukah - one of the main traditions for this holiday is to fry food and eat it.

I’m trying to remind myself that when you have four special events in one week, they’re not special anymore and I should start treating them like regular days. This is especially true for annual non-personal events like New Year’s Eve or Halloween.

And even some are really special, like a wedding, that still shouldn’t give me a reason to overeat. This is maybe an area in which I should be selfish - I’ll only indulge with food if the event is special to me personally. It’s an easy way to be discriminatory. My birthday, my wedding day, that’s about it. Not my husband’s birthday or a friend’s wedding. Not that I can’t enjoy some fancy food at a wedding. It’s more about an attitude of, “This is not that day.” Hell, maybe it will help me focus more on the happiness of the event than what I should have for dessert.

We’re going to a friend’s wedding next Sunday, and there is sure to be a ton of food. But as thrilled as I am for the bride and groom, it’s not my wedding, right? So I will enjoy some food, but (try to) focus on the dancing and fun and romance of the evening, and not on how many cookies I can fit onto a tiny dessert plate.