diet

Something weird happened this month.

I lost weight!

True, a large part of it was due to a kidney infection killing my appetite for the better part of a week, which led to an impressive 3.5 pound weight loss over a 24 hour period, but still, I stayed on track even after getting my appetite back. If it wasn’t for a small uptick right in the last two days of the month I would be down even more.

For May I dropped 5.2 pounds. For the year I am still up 0.7 pounds, but that may actually change by the end of June to a negative number. Woo, I say.

I have largely curtailed the snacking and when I do snack, I am sticking to lighter, healthier things like apples and yogurt.

The stats:

May 1: 168.2 pounds
May 31: 163 pounds (-5.2 pounds for the month)

Year to date: From 162.3 to 163 pounds (up 0.7 pounds)

And the body fat:

January 1: 18.5% (30.2 pounds of fat)
May 31: 19% (30.9 pounds of fat–up 0.7 pounds)

Tonight I did an elliptical workout at the Canada Games Pool and it was a good, sweaty half hour in which I burned 336 calories. The bonus, as always, is being able to look down at a bevy of people with actual swimmers builds. One guy was helping with a young children’s swimming lesson and at first I thought he was sucking in his stomach. But he wasn’t. It was just so flat that it actually curved in instead of out.

My stomach does not curve in.

Also I ate a bowl of Chocolate Cheerios today. They were delicious.

As I watched ol’ inwardly curved stomach guy teach small children how not to drown (a skill I still have yet to fully master) I thought about how well my weight loss is going in this early part of 2018–I’m at 167.2 pounds and 18.9% body fat, both up from this time last year and up from pretty much all of last year–and consider the balance between exercise and snacking.

I am still exercising. This is good.

I am still snacking. This is not as good.

I am exercising less regularly. This is not really good. When combined with the snacking, the results are obvious: fat, and plenty of it.

The solution, then, is to cut down on my snacking. I lost about 40 pounds by changing my diet in 2008. Maybe I can do the same for the 10 year anniversary, Except I don’t want to lose 40 pounds because I’m still 20 pounds lighter than 2008 me, so a 40 pound loss would result in me being “tumbled down the street by a strong gust of wind” light.

But can I reduce my snacking? I’ve remained donut-free so far, but I’ve pretty much just turned to donut substitutes. Maybe reduction isn’t the answer and elimination is.

And so I pledge here on this blog and to the several people that accidentally stumble across it from time to time, perhaps hoping to find some tasty creole recipes, to go 100% snack-free.

Starting on Saturday.

Why Saturday? It’s a run day and I tend to eat less on run days. Also there are still snacks about so I need tomorrow to figure out what to do with them, even if it means shoving them into my mouth. But no more after Saturday.

I will report back on my inwardly curved stomach progress some time in March.

As part of my renewed weight loss regime I’ll be reporting on my spectacular progress at the start of every month.

As this is the first month there is no spectacular progress as of yet but soon there shall be!

Weight: 165.9 pounds
Goal: 145 pounds

Required weight loss for goal: 20.9 pounds

If I lose a mere two pounds per month I’ll hit my goal two months early. Easy peasy!

Let’s take a look at my progress in getting back to my running form in 2016 by checking in on what my weight was like on January 1st and how it ended up on January 31st.

January 1: 169.5 pounds
January 31: 170.1 pounds

I have gained 0.6 pounds.

On the positive side, the weight gain is fairly trivial and could easily be attributed to something like water weight, a rounding error, etc.

On the less-positive side, it’s still up instead of down. Weight loss kind of requires the numbers to get smaller, not larger.

I shall renew my no-snacks pledge for February.

This month I decided I would try to trim away all the extra flab I acquired in the last few months of 2013. Here are the results in graphical form from myfitnesspal.com, where I have been tracking my weight on a daily basis:

As you can see, over the course of 30 days I managed to lose…zero pounds.

For the curious, the low point on that chart is 171.6 pounds on January 12.

On the one hand this is not terribly impressive because it means it would take approximately infinity for me to lose any weight at all. On the other hand I didn’t gain weight, so I’ve at least stemmed the fat-filled tide.

Successes for January
I managed to reduce my snacking/donut addiction at school (where I work) to a single donut one Friday afternoon and that single donut was provided free of charge. I resisted the candy bowl filled with chocolate that sat on the front counter until it was completely empty. As the bowl itself was not made of chocolate I was safe at that point. I reduced my incessant gorging of snacks at home.

Failures for January
I did not run or exercise as much as I planned to. This is important because I typically eat less on exercise days. My snacking at home was still higher than it should be and often consisted of the wrong sort of snacks–potato chips instead of yogurt, cookies instead of carrot sticks. There is room for much improvement here. I also need to start making my own lunch again as this will reduce my caloric intake by a few hundred each day.

Goals for February

1. Only healthy/low cal snacks at home or no snacks at all.
2. Exercise at least three times per week.
3. Do not eat my weight in muffins or anything muffin-like.

I was going to have a snack tonight before bed but resisted. To quote GlaDOS from Portal, this is a triumph.

I will post the results of tomorrow’s weigh-in (the last for the month) tomorrow. If I actually end up for the month I am going to force myself to pee until that changes.

UPDATE, January 31: I weighed in at 172.8 pounds, down 0.6 pounds, thus saving the need for any extra peeing. 0.6 pounds down for the entire month. Woo, I say.