Back on Track

Back on Track
It’s been nearly a whole month since I last wrote for the blog. Much has transpired in that time; not all of it good. For the last 7 days, I have exercised every day; all of us it using ‘The Biggest Loser’ videos. I’m doing the Bob’s ‘Boot Camp’ level 1 except 1 day I added ‘Weight Loss Yoga’ in to get started. That run of exercise was after about two weeks of not doing ANY exercise. During that time I also got into the bad habit of not tracking my calories as timely; sometimes having to do an entire day the next day. While I tried to account for everything I ate, I figure it is inevitable that I forgot at least a few things. Inasmuch as I didn’t forget food, my calories stayed pretty good. The first week of March I averaged 1759/day and the next two weeks it was between 1900-2000. I was still motivated to lose weight and I did a pretty good job of eating right, but I’d lost the motivation to exercise.

It happened a week after first doing ‘biggest loser’ videos and stopping what I had been doing on the treadmill and with free weights. I’d resisted using the videos before because I was afraid to change what had already been working and which I had a pretty good routine with. I feared that changing would lead me to losing the will to keep at it. And either because it was a good instinct, or a self fulfilling prophesy, that is exactly what happened.

But I felt guilty about it every day. And eventually I started getting the head aches again, which had slowly gone away when I had started exercising in January. I thought back when I started that exercise would make them go away, but I assumed it would be immediate. That the head aches were stress induced and so a workout would remove that stress. When that didn’t happen, I was a little discouraged, but kept at it. Gradually I got them less and only when I started getting them again a week or 2 ago did I realize that it had been some weeks since I’d last had one.

The first week I didn’t do any exercise, I still managed to lose 1.8 pounds. Considering that the previous week (with exercise) I had only lost 0.4 pounds, that was a victory. Then last week, after two weeks of not exercising, reality set in and I actually gained back a pound I’d lost. That was the wake up call. The progress I’d made in the previous 50 days could all be lost very quickly. So, last Sunday, I got back on the wagon and started up again. And what do you know, the head aches went away within a couple days of starting and I didn’t feel guilty every day any more.

The other decision I made last week was to change my daily average calorie goal from 2000 to 1800. 2000 was actually pretty easy to do and I wanted to challenge myself a little after the previous two weeks of back-tracking and I figured it would also maintain, if not accelerate my weight loss. I did really well with it and came in this week with an average of 1738/day. And I am confident that I counted everything I ate too, because I got back to tracking what I ate during the day and not going to bed without ensuring that entire day was logged. The result? I lost 4 pounds this past week and finally surpassed the 20 pound mark (21.4 to be exact). That felt really good. This was also the first week since I started that I had done all 7 days with exercise.

I decided to post an updated picture, I think I can see a little difference in my face; not so puffy as before. Can’t really tell if my stomach is any smaller in this picture, but I think it probably is.

A milestone and a changing relationship with food

Today starts the 6th week of the new me. A little scary to say that since it assumes that I won’t just stop doing this at some point and gain back all the weight I’ve lost and more. But there is a confidence this time, or maybe a calmness that I’ve not had before when I’ve made other attempts to lose weight, eat better and exercise more. Especially in the last week, when I chose not to exercise as many days as I did choose to exercise. Yes, I was concerned, but I wasn’t in a panic that I was blowing it again. I am a little worried about being too relaxed about it and actually stopping, but I haven’t had that self loathing that usually accompanies a lapse in either eating well or exercising. And I’ve certainly had lapses in the eating department. At least once a week, for one meal, I’m just ignoring the diet completely and eating whatever I want; almost always because we have gone out to eat. But as I told Mindy today, as long as I can focus on the weekly average of calories, I think I should still be OK.

I hit what feels like a big milestone this week, even with exercising less. I’ve now lost over 16 pounds as of my last weigh in yesterday. Getting down under 230 was going to be a nice thing to see and I was concerned since I had not exercised as much if I would lose anything, much less get down to below 230. The previous week had been a tough one when I lost only 0.6 pounds, but this week I lost 5.6 pounds! Pretty amazing, but there was something else that was different this week; for the first time I came in under 2000 calories per day on average. 1609.13 to be exact and I feel pretty good that I tracked all my calories and it isn’t just an artifact of ‘lost’ calories that were consumed but not counted. So anyway, having lost 15 pounds feels pretty good and I’m looking forward to the next big number, which in my mind will be 20. At 2 pounds/week, that would take until April 4, but if I my current per week weight loss rate was sustained, I would hit it some time next week. I’ll take anything in between at this point and though I can’t quite figure out the logic of how/when my weight is coming off, I feel pretty confident that it will continue coming off fairly quickly for a while yet as long as I stay under 2K calories/day on average and exercise at least 5 time/week. I’d like to keep it at 6 just to be safe.

One thing that I though about early on is my changing relationship to food. What has come as a bit of a surprise to me is that I’m enjoying eating now more than I did before. There are multiple reasons. The most obvious and, in my mind anyway, most banal is that I’m more hungry now when I sit down to eat than I was most times before. I’d known before from the occasional missed meal or extreme physical workout how good food could be when I was really hungry, but I’m experiencing that almost every day now. To be sure, sometimes I get tired of grilled chicken and steamed vegetables, but even that is much more enjoyable than it would have been before. More philosophically, I’m feeling better about WHAT I’m eating and don’t have this guilt every time I sit down to a meal. I didn’t really realize it before, but I guess I knew somewhere inside me that I was doing my body harm just about every time I sat down to a meal and it was eating away (sorry) at me more than I realized. Finally, I’m ENJOYING and appreciating the food I eat so much more now. It brings home that something that you have too much of loses its value and ceases to be something about which you care about any longer. When I was eating all the time, and knew that I would be eating a bunch more after dinner, I didn’t really give my dinner, as I was eating it, too much thought. It was just what I ‘had’ to eat in order to feel justified in eating the chips, cookies, donuts, crackers and whatever else as soon as Camryn went to bed. And that made me feel guilty as well. I was waiting for her to go to bed so I could indulge myself in all the junk that I either went out to the local grocery store to buy after putting her to bed, or what happened to be left over from the previous night when I’d gotten two or three things to choose from.

The biggest difference though is in sweets. I have always had a weakness for sweets and it was a given that I would have some every day. Now, it is only a couple times/week and when I do have them, I really enjoy them. I actually sit down with a cookie and a glass of milk or cup of tea and enjoy it. I actually think about how it tastes and how good it is. Its so much different than sitting down in front of the TV with 3-4 cookies which I eat in a few bites without hardly noticing. It helps me to appreciate and enjoy it so much more than before.