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.

Weigh In: Fat vs. Muscle Edition

Another week gone. I love that the scale is out of sight and reach during the week. It forces me to focus on doing well, that day, because I can’t know if the scale is reflecting it.

This week’s numbers:

	Starting	6/8	8/19	9/30	10/29	11/19	12/31	1/7	1/14	1/21	1/28
Weight	200	191.2	182.6	181	181.4	177.6	177.2	176.6	175.8	174.8	174.6
Lbs. Fat		82.7	72.5	70.3	70.8	68.1	67.1	66.9	67.6	66.5	65.3
Lbs. Muscle		67.3	66.8	65.2	67.3	63.3	63.9	63.9	65	65.1	64.4

Well, look at that fat number back down! I’m so, so close to having more muscle weight than fat weight. That feels like a huge milestone. Net weight is about the same, but (as should be obvious from my previous post) that’s not shocking. Another funny thing is that my fat loss is higher than the total loss on the scale!

Now that it's just three weeks till my 26th birthday, I think my goal of getting to the 160s might not be in reach. I'm going to keep trying, of course, but my second goal/deadline is to get there by the end of February.

This has been a good week overall, despite the PMSing (see previous post for how that was). I worked out five times, with some strength training, brought my lunch in every day, and have been a faithful food tracker since June. 

However, I repeated my tired pattern of going overboard on Friday and Saturday and having to reel it in the rest of the week. Because it’s been a while, here is the calorie breakdown for this week (first number is gross calories, second number is net calories, so if there’s one number it means I didn’t work out):

Wednesday: 1530, 1100

Thursday: 1625, 1245

Friday: 2520, 2175

Saturday: 2200

Sunday: 1600, 940

Monday: 1585

Tuesday: 1350, 1100

So four low calorie days, two high calorie days, and one in the middle, for a net deficit about about 2260, or a little over half a pound. Obviously not ideal, since I’m aiming for a pound a week, but honestly? I’m okay with it. I really think that what I’m doing now, how I’m doing this, is a way that will stick. .6 pounds a week adds up to 30 pounds in a year. That means that if I do all the weeks exactly as I did this one, I would be at 145 next year - a weight I’ve NEVER been at as an adult.

Does it sound like I’m rationalizing a not-great week? Maybe I am, but I’m okay with that. So every week, I’m going to aim for a pound deficit - a great, sometimes lofty goal. But I’ll know that even if I can do half that, I’ll make incredible progress.

Do you have trouble going overboard on weekends?

How do you make the best of it?

Weigh-In: How to Define Weight Loss

Happy Holidays to everyone! Or you’re like me and thrilled that it’s almost over.

This week’s weigh-in:

	6/8	8/19	9/30	10/29	11/6	11/19	12/10	12/17	12/24
Weight	191.2	182.6	181	181.4	179.6	177.6	179	179.2	179.6
Lbs. Fat	82.7	72.5	70.3	70.8	70.3	68.1	66.9	68.4	69.5
Lbs. Muscle	67.3	66.8	65.2	67.3	65	63.3	64	67.3	68

A little up, but mostly the same. Not what I was expecting, since I had a good week and was expecting to have lost a pound.

Zooming out over the last few months, overall I’ve been frustrated. Things don’t seem to be adding up (or rather, down) and I feel like I’ve been around the same 3-5 pounds for months now.

The upside is that I’ve been tracking my food intake consistently since maybe last February, so I have a lot of information to work with and I don’t just have to sit around and stew in my injustice. This is one of the things that I’m really proud of - I try to track as honestly as possible, even when the last thing I want to do is admit that I ate 500 calories worth of bread at dinner.

The last time I felt this way, that the scale wasn’t reflecting my efforts, was in June when I was 192 pounds.  However, when I added up the numbers, I quickly realized that I had been having way more “maintenance” days than I realized, and in fact my lack of weight loss was perfectly in line with what I was eating.

So before I got too mad at the scale this time around, I knew I need to do some more number crunching to see if I’m actually weighing more than I “should” or it’s all in my head again.

I made one large chart with all measurements from June through the end of last week - net calories and calorie deficit based on an 1800 calorie maintenance level for each day; then I cross-referenced it with weight measurements. So I can figure out what the calories say I should weigh at a certain time, and what the scale actually said.

So here are the results, in sum: Since June, I have eaten about 60,000 fewer calories than I need. Score! Of those 60,000, about 13,000 are from the last ten weeks. That means I theoretically should have lost 17 pounds total by now, and a little under four in the last ten weeks (yeah, October was not a great month).

In reality it’s more like twelve pounds lost overall and two pounds of that in the last ten weeks. Not adding up, so perhaps my frustration is legitimate. But what has changed is the fat - today I have a little over fourteen fewer pounds on my body, and exactly the same muscle mass. In the last ten weeks, I’ve lost about 2-3 pounds of fat. My conclusion is that the fat mass measurements are much more accurate overall than the weight ones. Thus, perhaps I should focus on the fat numbers and have the overall weight be secondary, instead of the other way around? Revolutionary!

I try to keep in mind is that my body is not magic and can’t defy the laws of physics and gravity. If I keep eating at a deficit, I will lose weight and it will all add up. It seems it will be frustratingly, agonizingly slow, but what other choice do I have?

The other thing to remember is that even the best estimate, hell, even the nutrition facts on a label are probably going to be off by a bit. With that, the gap between what I do weigh and what I think I should weigh shrinks. Or maybe my body only burns 1750 calories each day, though I’ve been counting it as 1800. I think 17 pounds should be gone, in reality it’s 14 pounds. That’s maybe not so much, in the end.

I still want to get into the 160s by my 26 birthday, which gives me another 7-8 weeks to lose ten pounds. That may not be likely at this point, but I’m going to try to get as close as possible.

Weekly Weigh-In: Charts

You know how they say time passes more quickly as you get older? I’m only in my mid-twenties and I’m feeling it. I don’t even hate Mondays anymore, because I know the weekend will come (and then be over again) in what will feel like only a couple of moments. What is happening??

Existential crisis aside, this week was okay, but unfortunately included a few extra treats at home that I didn’t plan on. I’m still avoiding all the office treats, but that doesn’t mean as much if I turn down the fresh-baked cookies at work only to purchase one on my way home… Most of the blame for the bad choices is squarely on me, but I’m blaming a bit on PMS and thinking about food too much over the last holiday. Tracked it, trying to move up and on, but still analyzing, as is my personality.

When I got back from Michigan, I felt that too much time and energy had been spent on food - what to eat, how much to eat, how much I’d eaten - despite a good weigh-in. So when I got back, I was sick of making food decisions. Bottom line, I need to think of a better strategy for the next holiday, which will be starting this Wednesday night. Zero new ideas so far, besides “eat everything.” I’d like to eat more intuitively, but don’t know how. I’m open to suggestions.

On official weigh-in day, I weighed the same as the day before:

	6/8/2014	8/4/2014	8/19/2014	9/3/2014	9/17/2014	9/30/2014
Weight	191.2	184	182.6	182.8	180.4	181
Pounds Fat	82.7	74.5	72.5	73	72.1	70.3
Pounds Muscle	67.3	68.2	66.8	67.2	64.4	65.2

I was moping around about not being in the 170s yet, when J looked at my charts and pointed out that I have lost twelve pounds of fat. If I’m off about how many calories I burn every day, or if that number has decreased in the last ten pounds lost, then that actually makes sense. Twelve pounds seems like more than ten. Maybe my goal should be to have less than 70 pounds of fat on me instead of weighing in the 170s.

J also made a chart, because he likes making charts and he's helpful like that.

The orange dots show fat loss over time, and the grey dots represent calorie deficits, assuming a lower metabolic rate of 1800. As you can see, they match up pretty well, implying that my whining isn't warranted since I am, in fact, losing fat at a reasonable rate for what I'm eating.

No matter what though, I’m definitely getting too focused on the scale. Weighing in every day only helps if I can take the number in its context, and right now I’m not doing that. So for the foreseeable future, I will only weigh myself on weigh-in day once a week.

Weigh-In: Pretentious Appetizers and Mojitos

There were several cocktails, a couple of shots, roasted potatoes, some kind of grilled flat bread with arugula and goat cheese, “creamy avocado dip with homemade tortilla chips” (fancy chips and guacamole), and, of course, Cheetos.

It was a really fun night out with my coworkers, celebrating the departure of one of the attorneys. Last Thursday evening started at the happy hour with a mojito and ended at 3 am at a karaoke bar with Cheetos and several outstanding renditions of classic 2000s pop songs.

However, it was also my highest daily calorie intake in a long time. When I finally calculated up everything on Friday, my estimated total was about 3,000 calories. So, yikes. Amazing how quickly a few cocktails and appetizers could add up to such a massive amount of calories. I knew I was saying screw it and enjoying the food and drinks, but I didn’t realize how much until after. And even after that, I enjoyed a delicious burrito the size of my head for lunch on Friday, a totally unnecessary consumption.

I’m not going to be angry at myself, especially since I picked myself back up on Saturday, but I’ve been thinking about what happened, why I let myself get so out of hand. Maybe it was just the rare calorie wild evening, which could fit into an overall healthy lifestyle. My coworkers imbibed as much as I did, and none of them have weight issues, so clearly they know how to balance food- and drink-filled nights with regular daily life. Or maybe I really needed an evening of just eating whatever I wanted. However, I will try to remember that those every-once-in-a-while nights only work if they truly are every once in a while.

Here is this week’s weigh in:

Measurements	June 8th	August 4th	August 12th	August 19th	August 26th
Weight	191.2	184	183	182.6	181.4
Pounds Fat	82.7	74.5	70.4	72.5	71.8
Pounds Muscle	67.3	68.2	66.4	66.8	67.3

So basically, score! Another pound down, and now officially ten lost total. Last week, when the scale didn’t seem to reflect the successes from the week, I(so graciously) decided to forgive it. This week, I scraped up a ½ pound deficit even with the 3,000 calorie day. This is good. I can do this.

I may yet squeak out my goal of getting to the 170s by Labor Day, but probably only if I dehydrate myself a bit.

Weekly Weigh In & Thoughts on Goal Weight Bodies

I’m getting a little better at being patient about getting to my goal weight. One things that helps is not overly focusing on it. Measuring, weighing, and tracking food, and exercising take up time and effort, but I can let them become a part of normal life, as routine as brushing my teeth. My day can be measured by the positive feedback I got at work as much as or more than the calorie deficit.

Still sticking to my food plan and tracking everything, even during the time out with friends. However, one frustrating part of this last week involved ice cream. Basically I learned that I’m still not ready to keep certain junk foods in the house. Last week, we bought some Edy’s slow churned after a really strenuous afternoon at the gym. I enjoyed some, netted about 1100 calories for the day, and all was well. But then later in the week, I found myself spooning some out without measuring, and ate it, not really caring that it would negate the day’s calorie deficit. 

Not such a horrible situation, obviously, but I realized after the fact that if the ice cream hadn’t been in the apartment, I wouldn’t have even been thinking about having it or cared when I didn’t. So at least for now, I’m not going to keep it in the apartment. There are four different ice cream or froyo places within half a mile of our apartment, thus plenty of options for when we want it.

This week’s weigh-in:

Measurements	6/8/2014	8/4/2014	8/12/2014
Weight	191.2	184	183
Pounds Fat	82.7	74.5	70.4
Pounds Muscle	67.3	68.2	66.4

I’m going to assume that the net pound loss is real, but the fat and muscle are likely flukes - I did not lose over four pounds of fat in one week, as awesome as that would be. According to my own tracking of daily calorie deficits, I “should” have lost ten pounds. The actual weight loss, according to the scale/chart, is a little over eight pounds and maybe nine or ten pounds of fat. That’s pretty close, which makes me think that my data might be accurate. I'll see how it does in the long term.

When I’m doing well with weight loss, I think about getting to goal - what I’ll look like, what I might wear, how I’ll feel, how I’ll keep it off. I remind myself that losing all the weight is not going to solve all my problems or magically make me happy always & forever, but on the outside I will probably look very different.

It occurred to me yesterday that nobody in the world, including myself, has ever seen what I’m genetically supposed to look like. The last time I was at a healthy age was when I was six. I’ve known a few people who have lost 50-100 pounds, and their transformations were astounding  - the extra weight that had always changed their faces and bodies was gone. This isn’t about a person being more or less attractive at different weights, but just how dramatic the changes can be.

I know what I do look like, of course, but my face is a little too round and that garbles my bone structure, and my body hints at but doesn’t actually exemplify my genes. Might I actually posses the great legs that run in my family? How deep are the dimples that I haven’t seen at all in over a year? A third thing to round it off?

Week Seven, Almost There: Women's Magazines and Scales

Open any women’s magazine, point to a page at random, and chances are the contents will be about weight loss. (Actually it will be an ad. For a weight loss product. Or mascara.) But if the page talks about weight loss, then somewhere amongst the five ways you can lose two inches in two weeks, the author will mention how scales are not accurate measurements of weight loss progress for the short term. They get too confused over silly things like bloating and can’t tell when I haven’t, in fact, gained half a pound, because I’ve been so good so something else must be going on.

Even though it should go both ways, I (like most people) don’t question the number on the scale when it’s lower than it was the week before. I don’t think, Oh, that’s not a real loss, I’m a bit dehydrated at the moment. Hell no - I do a mockery football-touchdown dance and gleefully mark it in whatever place I’m using to track everything. But if the number isn’t what I like, I quickly think over any possible reason that could explain how I could have actually lost weight and the scale just isn’t reflecting it. Sometimes it’s true - even my fancy body fat scale can change its own numbers if I weigh myself in different parts of the room - sometimes I just ate too much, and need to accept that the number might be accurate.

This is one of the reasons tracking calories can be so helpful. A couple of months ago, it helped me realize that bloat wasn't the culprit in my stagnating weight, just conveniently forgotten bad days. Hence my “reboot” plan to be more aware of calories. Currently, I am on the last week of my Eight Week Reboot plan and my average calorie intake is still on the "one pound loss per week train," of which I’m proud. I'd like it to be a little higher, but one pound a week adds up.

To more pounds.

According to the numbers - assuming I burn 1850 on an average day - I “should” see an eight pound loss when I step on the scale next week. That would bring me to 183 or so. Whatever the scale says, I know I’ve shed nearly eight pound from my body, and I have the data to prove this. So while I really want to see that number and then get the hell out of the 180s forever, I need to be okay with that not happening.

The last week of this plan will have some challenges. J and I will be heading north with the rest of my family for the wedding of a close family friend, and I’ll be taking off work this Friday to drive up to Connecticut. I’m so excited for the wedding, but will need to remind myself I don’t need to eat everything in order to properly celebrate. And just because I’m not at home in a familiar setting doesn’t mean I’m missing out if I say no. J will be there with me, that will help a lot, and I’ll do my best.

Yay!

I have no official meal plan for this week since we’re heading out on Thursday and I’m making dinners based on what I find in the fridge. However, I did accomplish my main food-related Sunday goal, which is to make one dish that can serve as lunch for at least four days during the week. This week is vegetable lo mein - made with lo mein noodles, purple cabbage, onions, sesame oil, soy sauce, garlic, and ginger. It’s not ideal protein-wise but I have some dairy on the side. Making one dish to serve for multiple lunches is cheaper and removes the decision of what to eat or how to estimate it during lunchtime.

As I’ve said, this is the last “official” week of my plan, but I’m going to keep going with this method of 1000-1100 calories per day, and then perhaps start increasing the calories over time. having a lower goal actually helps me end up in a good deficit place because there’s such a good cushion. Cheap psychological trick, but effective. I’ve felt great, eaten well and haven’t been hungry, so I’ll continue on this way.