Weight Loss
I've been thinking about health and fitness a lot lately, specifically weight loss. Although it's probably more accurate to say fat loss, because scale weight takes muscle mass into account. I've been struggling for months now because of the monotony of calorie logging and only just getting back into a regular habit, so understandably my scale weight has jumped up a bit (and I don't think it's because of my personal training sessions started back in Jan/Feb).
The other day my wife made a suggestion to me that got me thinking: I should do the same thing I did ten years ago when I was preparing for my friend's wedding. The thing is, I don't recall doing anything very different than I already am. The only differences I can think of would be that I was a little more strict with the calorie logging (and I was making calculations manually), and I was going to the gym more regularly and doing a lot of cardio. Of course, as I mentioned, I haven't been tracking calories regularly until this past week so I have yet to see how things will progress going forward.
But as this got my fitness-brain gears in motion, I thought I would check my old weight spreadsheets from ten years ago to see if I could glean any insight into how I did things. It turns out I can't, because it's just spreadsheets full of numbers. But it's still a tiny bit inspiring - it looks like from the period of March 2014 to August 2014, I dropped from ~250 to ~234 pounds. Holy cow! That is a significant drop in the span of 5 months.
Could I do it again? Maybe, but looking at things now I feel that is a bit extreme for me now at 40, versus me at 30. Well, maybe not. That original weight loss amounts to approximately 3 pounds per month. Even if I worked on losing 0.5 pounds per week, that's still just ~2 pounds per month.
It's not impossible, but it means I do need to adjust my expectations. My emotional side wants to see quick results, but my logical side knows that there is never a quick fix. Just as I should be making micro goals for general goals every month, I should be making micro goals for fitness as well.
I think I'm doing that so far. I started small:
- May was about getting back into the food logging habit - just logging one meal a day
- June is about getting into the habit of logging a full day's worth of meals on weekdays, logging one meal on weekends
- July will be about logging in full every day
- In August, work on staying at or below my daily calorie limit
(Although I may revise my June goal to logging full meals every day in which case I'll focus more on calorie targets in July. I'm still in week one, so I'm cooling my jets a little at this point.)
My overarching goal is to remain patient. It is so easy to change that slider in Cronometer to 1 pound per week because I'm not seeing results. I'm more interested in my full body scan every two months to show my full body composition to get a better picture at how my weight is being distributed. Thus, I need to be patient and just keep taking data points.
It's a slow process but I know that I can get there with some work.
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