Weigh in 4:21

Another late post!  one of these weeks I will get back on the stick and post on time.  Wednesday was actually quite busy for me so not only was I not able to post, but I didn't even weigh myself, so this week's numbers are from Thursday.  I was down 0.8 pounds, which while small is a loss, and consistent with my results to date.  Considering my complete lack of exercise it will have to do.  I weighed in at 387.6 on the new scale.  385 this week would be fantastic, and I feel I am doing pretty well so far.  I had a very vigorous dance rehearsal on Thursday as well as some other intermittent physical activity.  Paired with good good choices so far I think I am on the way to good results.

My appointment with the personal trainer got pushed back a week, so this Tuesday I should get some new strategies for building physical strength and stamina.  Rehearsals for my show should start to be more consistently movement heavy as well, so I feel good about where I will be going forward.  I now need to commit to it.  I hope for a more thoughtful and detailed post (and on time) this Wednesday.

Weigh In 4:20

Decent week.  I am a bit behind in posting due to a combination of things, including booking a show!  I will be performing in Route 66 at Metropolis PAC in Arlington Heights this fall.  I get to sing, dance, and even play a little guitar.  Back to the weigh in, I ended up at 388.4 on the new scale, which is a loss of two pounds.  I was able to get back my small gain and then some, and considering I still have the difficulty of a night shift job I feel pretty good about that.  I did not work out beyond walking on my lunch breaks, so I have lots of room for improvement there.  This week I will have my first meeting with an acquaintance who is a personal trainer, and I hope she can give me some techniques and workouts that will be effective in boosting my metabolism and building a little bit of strength.  Given the difficulty I have had thus far I am hoping this is the missing link between me and some good results.

A new month means new goals.  I am going to keep them ambitious, as there is no reason to be anything but bold when setting goals.  I would like to get to 375 by the end of this month, which gives me about 5 weeks to lose 13+ pounds.  That is big, but very doable.  My friend Sam has given me the extra motivation of a possible theme park trip in Florida next summer, and I want to get back on some roller coasters.  That is going to take big weight loss, and as slowly as things have gone so far this year (less than 30 pounds in 6 months) I know I can do it.

Weigh In 4:19

This was a rough week, folks.  I started a new temp job that has me working early, late, overnight, and everywhere in between.  One necessary evil this week has been a ton of caffeine, and the changing hours have had me struggling to figure out meals.  Add in an inability to exercise as much as I have been in recent weeks and you get a gain.  I feel a little lucky it was only a pound, to be honest.

I weighed in at 385 on my old scale, and 390.4 on the new one.  I weighed myself during the week to measure the difference and about 5 1/2 pounds seems to be the average, so I am going to call it 5.4 and call it a day.

As things stabilize this week my hope is that I can eat a little better and take a few more pounds off.  I am still adjusting, though, and my shifts are still all over the place, so I am not going to kill myself to do it.  I still struggle with thinking of this as my new lifestyle rather than as a temporary inconvenience.  For as slow as it is going this time around I am able to enjoy myself a bit more, and maybe that is a good balance.

Recalibrating

The new scale has arrived!  It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of my old one, but it has a very wide base which will help with accuracy, and it is new and factory calibrated, so I know it is (more) accurate than my current scale.  Here is the old one:

And here is the new one:

An unfortunate reality is that my current scale is inaccurate in the wrong direction.  I opened up the new scale and weighed myself on both and the new scale was 5.4 pounds heavier.  I was 384 on the old and 389.4 on the new.  Now, I have been weighing myself on the same scale the whole time so this does not change how much I have lost, just where I started and where I am now.  I will do a couple more calibrations to get an average difference, and then I will adjust my previous numbers to match.  So far I am break even for the week (though I weighed later today than usual), so that should make things a little easier.

Weigh in 4:18

It finally happened.  My scale has finally shuffled off this electrical coil and stopped working.  I should say I can still get on it and it will still give numbers, but they are so inconsistent and it takes so long to figure out what it wants to do that it is not useful right now.  I had to weigh myself 4 times today.  Once it settled on a pound up, once on a pound or so down, and twice it just kept fluctuating between 370 and 390 and then settling around 384 and then jumping all over the place again.  I took 384 as the number because that seemed to be the consensus number, but I could be a little up or a little down.  Suffice it to say that I had another mediocre week, although probably down just a tick.

This week I was victim to some poor preparation on my part.  I wasn't as strict on myself with food as I was last week, which is OK because I cannot do that every week.  I also was a bit lazy with exercise, though I still got around 35 points worth.  I missed out on monday because I was supposed to have a dance callback but the choreographer is injured so it has been moved to next week.  I did not want to tire myself with a workout or long walk earlier in the day, so a day I had planned to get exercise turned into one I did not get any.  Working exercise into my day to day life is still a new thing, so I must continue to get better at that.

A new challenge starts this week as well.  I have a new temp job to take me through to the start of my kids' shows in the fall.  It is part time, but mostly 3rd shift, so I will need to stay vigilant and work to plan my meals as I will be completely changing my body clock and personal schedule.  This is less than ideal, but I need work, so I will have to learn to work around it.

This coming week I know I can do a better job of working out and managing my food choices.  It sucks that I have to be as vigilant as I need to be, but complaining won't change that.  This weigh in puts me just over 1/3 of a year from my restart on the blog, and about 6 1/2 months to a new year.  In that time I have lost 20 pounds, and 26 for all of my time on weight watchers.  That puts me losing about another 40 or so for the year, and I would love to kick that up a bit.  Shooting for 320-325 by next January is a solid goal, and I would love to be under 300 for next summer.  If I can establish a better rhythm and habits, and keep going on my exercise I know I can blow past that, but purely based on what I have done those goals seem reasonable.

Thin Margins

In the past few weeks I have alternately been frustrated and elated with my results.  The frustration was from doing things right and not getting rewarded.  The elation was from reversing the trend.  One thing that has become frustratingly clear is how thin my margin for error is. This post is not to make excuses, but rather get out some big frustration I have over it.  I feel like I have to be constantly perfect in order to have consistent results, and that is the kind of mindset that leads to burnout and acting out against my diet.  I did not realize at the time, but 3 years ago this came so easily.  I barely got exercise, I frequently indulged in (reasonable) cheats, and I was losing over 3 pounds a week easily.  Now I can only get that eating 6 salads in a week and 5 workouts.

There are always things I can do better, but I would be inhuman if I didn't find it frustrating and see the distance to a healthy weight as very daunting.  Losing a pound a week is quite reasonable for folks looking to lose 20-30 pounds, but I need to lose at least another 130 pounds.  At a minimum.  At a pound a week pace that is two and a half years away.  In the 5 or so months I have been on program I have lost 25 pounds.  25 pounds is a lot and something I am trying to be proud of, but there is so far to go that It can be hard to see the trees for the forest, to corrupt a phrase.

Looking on the bright side I have only been really committed to working out for 3 weeks.  One of the surest ways to increase metabolism is to increase lean muscle mass, and as the work I am doing compounds I should see better results and have more of a margin.  As I have mentioned many times my meds put me on the back foot, but they also make workouts possible without having a heart attack, so I will have to take the good with the bad.  There is room for improvement with my diet, and every little bit helps.  The Weight Watchers Points system is helpful, and a little more user friendly than calorie tracking, but it is not perfect, and some points are better than others.

This is a constant learning process, and it is something I have to live with forever.  Sometimes that takes adjustment.  A little progress is still progress.  The journey can be as valuable as the destination.  I think tomorrow that will feel truer to me.  Today I had to talk it out a bit.

Weigh In 4:17

Now that is more like it!  After last week's debacle I was hoping that my body was merely trying to reset and not that I had made some huge error in my accounting of things.  As I posted earlier in the week the 4th was not a great day for me on my diet, so I am even happier that I managed to have a great week and still have one ridiculous day.  I weighed in this morning at 385.2, which is a loss of 3.2 pounds.  That is the kind of range I would like to be in on a weekly basis.  If I can string together 3 more weeks like this then I can hit about 375 by month's end, which would achieve my most ambitious goal for the month.  Considering how previous weeks have gone this may not be realistic, but I think shooting for somewhere south of 380 is a solid goal.

Considering the fact my diet was not perfect this week I have to look at the other changes I made to see from where the progress came.  The first, and most obvious, is from exercise.  Last week was decent, but this week was great.  I hit the elliptical 3 times for a total of about an hour, and took an hour walk as well.  Unfortunately being a big guy meant that this also meant that by yesterday I had a bit of a chafing issue, so yesterday I also did a few reps with my free weights, and although it probably did not do much in terms of calories it did get my blood pumping just a little bit and couldn't have hurt, especially on a day when a jog or walk was painfully unrealistic.  I have discovered that Netflix is my best friend for working out on the elliptical because it does just enough to take my mind off of how sweaty and tired I am and keep going.  A sitcom episode is perfect because by the time the credits hit I can slow things down and cool off and have about 25 minutes done.  Walks are less of a problem because I am outside with much more pleasant surroundings and it is not nearly as vigorous as my elliptical sessions.

Another strategy that helped this week was my protein buster.  Two days of salads had me craving anything but by the third day, but it really got me back on the right track.  Starting Sunday I pretty much ate as I normally would.  The results speak for themselves, so I think at least every other week a few salad days consecutively are going to become part of my repertoire.

This week I want to keep going with what I achieved this week.  This is a great baseline to shoot for, so I plan to keep up what has worked.  40-50 points worth of exercise, a few salads, and keep it sensible otherwise.