This year I set a weight goal of 145 pounds. On January 1st I weighed 165.9 pounds, meaning I have nearly 21 pounds to lose. Yikes. Here’s where I’m at after the first month:
January 1: 165.9 pounds
January 31: 164.2 pounds
Weight loss: -1.7 pounds
Not bad but I’d technically miss my goal–at this pace, I’d be 145.5 pounds by December. Clearly, I need to step up the exercise, cut down the snacking or ideally both. I am making progress, though not being able to jog outside yet is cramping my exercise style. I only had two donuts the entire month, though! My goal for February is to go donut-free. And lose more than two pounds.
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 was down an even two pounds today, dropping from 167.3 to 165.3. Even though I had no real snacks yesterday, this still surprised me. But it is encouraging.
Today I was bad and ate an apple strudel but was sufficiently guilty afterward to go out and do my first 5K in over four months, so it kind of worked out in the end. Not snacking is not easy but I’ve compensated for the strudel incident, behaved since returning from my run, and am fairly sure I’ll make it to bed without eating an entire cake.
Good news: With the Christmas break only two work days away, I will no longer be tempted by (and indulge in) assorted calorie-rich goodies regularly dropped off at work
Bad news: After going up by a pound following a workplace potluck yesterday, I indulged again today and expect to be up yet again tomorrow, erasing my meager progress. But from tomorrow forward, it’s all downhill. In a good way.
As expected, weighing myself much earlier today (around the usual weekday weigh-in time of 6 a.m. vs. 10 a.m. on the weekend) meant my weight was up. By 2.2 pounds. Egad.
On a more positive and less blimp-like note, yet another box of chocolates was passed around at work today and instead of gobbling a bunch as has become my standard response when offered, I took none. I wanted a big fat serving of poutine for lunch but instead only had a Clif bar. I wanted donuts. Lots of donuts. But resisted. Hopefully I can continue this trend.
Good news: I’ve stopped my weight from ballooning out of control like some out of control balloon. I’ve dropped from a peak of 167.3 pounds and leveled off at 166.3.
Bad news: The body fat percentage continues to creep upward. It’s now at 19.3%. This wouldn’t be so bad if I wasn’t normally a skinny guy. But I am normally a skinny guy and the tire developing around my gut is resplendent and awful.
Fortunately (?) I’ll probably be too busy this week to do much snacking, even if I wanted to (and to be perfectly honest, I still want to because I haven’t gotten to the point where I’ve curbed my appetite yet).
A haiku in tribute to a month of nearly zero weight loss. Not that I’m bitter. I’m totally not. At all.
Maybe a little.
I confess to having nipped at a cookie or two, so I have no one but to blame but my stupid hands and their ability to pick up edible things and shove them into my willing mouth. I’ll work on this in February. In the meantime, haiku:
A desire to slim
The donuts are forbidden
But sprinkles linger
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
Only healthy/low cal snacks at home or no snacks at all.
Exercise at least three times per week.
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.
In the last few months of 2013 two things happened:
I stopped running.
I started eating a lot of shortbread. Delicious, yummy shortbread.
In October at my annual physical I weighed in at 160 pounds. This was eight pounds more than the previous year. It was also ten pounds above my usual target of 150 pounds. This was bad.
On January 1st I stepped on the scale (it cried out) and saw these numbers: 174.6.
Yes, I was nearly 25 pounds over my target weight and more than 30 pounds over my low of 2012 when I tipped the scale at a mere 143 pounds during the height of my summer runs.
My size 30 jeans were no longer feeling comfy. I had to stand really straight to get a sort-of flat tummy in profile. I felt blah and listless. I kept stuffing shortbread into my face.
With the new year conveniently at hand I put myself back onto a weight loss regimen. As of this morning that horrific 174.6 number has changed to the slight-less horrific number of 172.2. It could be water, it could be a rounding error, the important thing is it’s going in the right direction and even though there is shortbread here right now, mere feet away from me in the kitchen, I AM NOT EATING IT.
I have been mostly snack-free these four days and the snacks I’ve allowed myself–a cube or two of Havarti cheese, some popcorn, a few carrot sticks–have kept me well under my daily calorie total. This is the hard part, the first week where my fat stomach says “I’m hungry, please continue to shove food into the mouth, okay?” and I must tell my stomach “No, you big stupid fat thing. You’ll have your two carrot sticks and you’ll like it!”
I’ll check in once a week or so to report whether my brain or stomach is triumphing.
